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Second International 

Moral Education 

Congress 



The Hague, August 22-27, 1912 



Papers Contributed by American Writers and 

Review of Recent American Literature 

on Moral Education 



Published by 

The American Committee of the 

International Congress 



SECOND INTERNATIONAL 

MORAL EDUCATION 

CONGRESS 



r&7 



THE HAGUE, AUGUST 22-27, 1912 



Papers Contributed by American Writers and 

Review of Recent American Literature 

on Moral Education 



AMERICAN COMMITTEE 



DR. FELIX ABLER, 

Chairman 



PROF. HARRY A. OVERSTREET, 

Corresponding Secretary 

DR. HENRY NEUMANN, 
Literary Secretary 



Dr. Felix Abler 

Prof. Thomas M. Balltet 

Prof. Clifford W. Barnes 

Prof. Earl Barnes 

Mrs. E. C. Bodman 

President Nicholas Murray Butler 

Mrs. Ella Lyman Cabot 

Mr. Percival Chubb 

Hon. p. p. Claxton 

Prof. George A, Coe 

Prof. John Dewey 

Prof. James H, 



Dr. John L. Elliott 
Dr. Luther H. Gulick 
Mrs. David Kirk 
Dr. William H. Maxwell 
Dr. Adolph Meyer 
Dr. Henry Neumann 
Prof. Harry A. Overstreet 
Mr. George A. Plimpton 
Prof. Frank C. Sharp 
Mrs. Anna Garlin Spencer 
President Joseph Swain 
Tufts 



PUBLISHED BY 

THE AMERICAN COMMITTEE OF THE 
INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS 



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SFP 27 mi? 






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CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Development of Moral Thoughtfulness 

in the School Frakk C. Shaep 1 

A Progressive Scheme of Moral Edu^ 
cation Through Successive Periods 
of Life Felix AoiJia 16 

Moral Education in the Life of the 

Community Robert A. Woods 29 

Some Misconceptions of Moral Edu- 
cation Henry Neumann' 33 

Moral Education of Children Frank A. Manny 41 

Duty of the School to Educate for the 

Right Use of Leisure Percival Chubb 46 

Improved Methods in Sunday School 
Work David Phillipson 53 

Moral Instruction and Training in the 

Sunday Schools of America George A. Coe 64 

Self-Government as a Means of Moral 

Education William R. George 69 

Relation of Moral Education to the 

Self-Directed Group John Love joy Elliott 79 

Moral Training and Social Service in 

the Colleges Edwin C. Moore 85 

Conscious Purpose and the Formation 

of the Brain Mrs. A. Vance Cheney 87 

'^ Direct Teaching of Morals Through 
the Biographical Element in Lit- 
erature Miss Charity Dye 93 

Ethical Values in History David S. Mttzzey 100 

Visual Instruction in Morals Milton Fairchild 112 

Education for Parenthood in Relation- 
ship to Moral Training Dr. Helen C. Putnam 114 

Character Building in Deaf Mutes Thomas F. Fox 117 

Moral Instruction of the Deaf Harris Taylor 124 

Delinquent Girls Mrs. Annie Winsoe Allen . . 125 

The Camp-Fire Girls and Moral Edu- 
cation Luther H. Gulick 139 

The Present Moral Education Problem 
in America Joseph Lee 146 

Social Service Activities in Connection 
with Schools Mrs. Ella Lyman Cabot 150 

Relation of Moral Education to Moral 
Protection Mrs. Anna Garlin Spencer. . 163 



CONTENTS 
REVIEW OF AMERICAN LITERATURE ON MORAL EDUCATION 

" Some Relations of Religious and Sec- ^age 

\ilar Education " Eixmer E, Brown 181 

" Boys' Self-Governing Clubs " Mis^ Winifred Buck 182 

"Ethical Value of Industrial Subjects": 

Principles of Secondary Education 

Vol. III. — '' Ethical Training " Charles De^ Garmo 183 

" Moral Principles in Education " John Dewey 184 

" Social Aspects of Education " Irving King 187 

" The Boy and His Gang" J. Adams Puffer 188 

" How Two Hundred Children Live 

and Learn " Rudolph Reeder 189 

" Social Education " Colin C. Scott -192 

" Working with the Hands " Booker T. Washington 194 

Other Books and Articles 195 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF MORAL THOUGHTFULNESS 
IN THE SCHOOL 

Professor Frank Chapman Sharp 

Those who believe that the school should undertake systematic 
work for the moralization of its pupils, seem, in the main, to be 
divided into two camps, those who rely for the attainment of their 
end upon moral instruction, and those who put their trust in moral 
training. The former use the lecture, in one or another of its 
various forms, or the text-book, and appeal chiefly to their pupils' 
powers of apprehension and memory. Most of its representatives 
confine their attention to the problem, what modes of conduct are 
right or wrong. But this limitation is not inherent in the system. 
The laws of life, and the technique of dealing with temptation, may 
form a part of such a programme as well as anything else. The 
essence of the method is that the end is knowledge, and the means, 
the imparting of information by the teacher. The advocates of 
the second method, on the other hand, seek to provide conditions, 
whether in the class room or out of school hours, that will make 
for the formation of habits of right action. 

The first of these methods is a constant object of ridicule for 
the representatives of the second. It has been likened by them to 
the attempt to teach svrimming by instruction given to the pupil 
when on land. Now it is one of the purposes of this paper to 
show that instruction in morals should be reduced to a minimum. 
But in so far as the criticism referred to is directed against the 
value to children and young people of information about the moral 
life, it misses the mark. Knowledge may not, by itself, be an effi- 
cient cause of moral action, but it is a conditio sine qua non. And 
there is only too much of it — and that, in part, of the highest im- 
portance, — that is a sealed book not merely to the child, but often 
to his parents. How many people know, what Comte, among 
others, has tried to teach us, that it is the duty of every person 
living by any useful work to regard himself, not as an individual 
working for his own private benefit, but as a public functionary, 
working for the benefit of society? And that the duty here stated 
is as sacred as, and indeed is at the foundation of the duty not to 



2 SECOND INTEUNATIONAI, MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

steal? How many newspaper owners have ever stopped to con- 
sider whether in advertising certain patent medicines they were not, 
in eiFect, guilty of murder? No one can maintain that such knowl- 
edge, properly imparted, will have no effect upon conduct. A let- 
ter of some forty words, written to the proprietor of Colliers' 
Weekly by a stranger, led to the exclusion of all such matter from 
that paper, and more than that, to one of the most vigorous cam- 
paigns against the patent medicine evil ever undertaken in the 
United States.^ 

But the need of information on the part of the child or youth 
extends much farther than these illustrations suggest. He needs 
a knowledge of the laws upon which the development of character 
depends; of the nature of his fellow beings; of their wants and 
his power to supply them. He should, for example, become ac- 
quainted with the laws of habit, and with the intimate and compli- 
cated relationships between physical and moral health. He must 
be brought to see the importance of self-knoAvledge, and to grasp 
the technique of self-control. He must learn that success in self- 
control is possible, even to the most hard-pressed, by being shown 
what others have endured on their way to conquest; and he must 
recognize that his own struggles are nothing exceptional, but are, 
on the contrary, whether in one form or another, nothing other than 
the common lot. Again he must be made to see the possibilities 
of good locked up in even the most unpromising of his fellow men, 
as a protection against the cynicism which is the bitterest foe of 
the spirit of service; he must learn that the life of service means, 
not weakness of will, but strength; he must be shown that the best 
in his own life is the product of the honest and faithful work of 
others, sometimes secured to him through the greatest sacrifices on 
their part; he must discover how high human nature can climb, that 
both humility and aspiration may be wakened. Once more, he needs 
to be shown that the law of cause and eifect works in human affairs 
with the same inexorability that it does in nature, and he ought to 
be taught what the leading laws are. Such knowledge is an essen- 
tial part of his equipment for life, and much of it can be obtained 
only through some form of class room work. There may be a bet- 
ter method of supplying this information than by pouring it in by 
means of the lecture or text-book. But at all events only a small 
part of it can be imparted through the process of training, and till 
1 J. A. Thayer, " Astir, A Publisher's Life Story," p. 205. 



DEVELOPMENT OF MORAX, THOUGHTFULNESS 3 

something better is provided^ the pouring in method cannot be re- 
j ected. 

The importance of the second method, that of training to the 
desired modes of action, has been so well presented again and again, 
that it can be dismissed in this place with a very few words. Knowl- 
edge must awaken feeling, and this latter find for itself an habitual 
channel to action; or the result is one of those two monstrosities, 
the moral pedant stuffed with knowledge which he never thinks of 
using, or the still more repellent and hopeless sentimentalist. The 
channels between thought and action must be opened and continu- 
ally deepened. This work moral training aims to do. 

Each of these methods, then, has its place in a complete pro- 
gramme of moral education. Each has also its very serious limita- 
tions. We begin with the first mentioned. In the first place the 
pouring in process, whether employed in this or any other field of 
instruction, does not even accomplish satisfactorily the narrow aims 
which it sets before itself. Material introduced into the system in 
this manner is, in great part, not assimilated, and even where it is, 
is not apt to be long retained by the memory. But this is the least 
count in the indictment. Suppose these ends attained as completely 
as you will, it still remains true that your pupil has not gained 
appreciably in the power to observe, to analyze, and to reason. 
What then is he going to do when he is in a situation which your 
instructions have not covered.^ You will find him ordinarily unable 
to make even the simplest application of the principles which you 
have inculcated with so much care. 

These strictures on the text-book and lecture system apply to 
every part of the field of knowledge from history to astronomy. 
But in the field here under consideration there are additional very 
serious objections to its use. No distinction is more frequently 
overlooked than that between what we believe and what we believe 
we believe, and, in matters moral, few distinctions are more impor- 
tant. Ask a hundred persons who regard the Sermon on the Mount 
as an infallible, God-given revelation, whether they consider re- 
venge wrong, and the majority will answer. Yes. Put concrete 
cases to them, and carefully eliminate from the situation the neces- 
sity of punishment on any other grounds than the retributive; the 
overwhelming majority will justify punishment in revenge. Face 
them with the specific prohibitions of Matthew v, and at least half 
will stand by their guns. Indeed so weak is mere authority where 



4 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

it comes into conflict with convictions having their source in deeply 
rooted emotions, that although for sixteen centuries the gospels 
have been the official guide of morals in Christendom, during the 
greater part of this time the belief has been not merely cherished 
in the bottom of the heart, but openly formulated and all but imi- 
versally avowed, that revenge under certain circumstances is not 
merely a right, but the most sacred of duties. What holds for a 
book regarded as infallible %vill certainly hold for the teacher who 
can urge no claim to infallibility. Dr. Elliott, who has been con- 
ducting courses in moral instruction in the New York Ethical Cul- 
ture School for many years, informs me that nothing which he can 
say avails to convince his twelve to fourteen year old pupils that 
revenge is wrong.^ Moral instruction does not have a mass of 
putty to deal with, as many people vainly imagine. Ideal, how- 
ever incoherent and imperfectly formulated, faces ideal from the 
day the teacher is confronted with his pupil in the school. Where 
there is conflict you can produce conviction, in the main, only by 
showing that your own ideal is the more adequate representation of 
what he is blindly groping for. Now you can perhaps accomplish 
this end by a demonstration which you yourself conduct, as teacher, 
for the benefit of your class, as some teachers demonstrate for 
their classes the propositions in geometry. But apart from the 
more obvious difference between mathematics and morals, in the 
latter field self-interest and powerful passions tend to deflect the 
attention and paralyze thought along one line, and produce hyper- 
trophy of attention and thought along the opposite line, so that 
even where there is verbal assent, there may not be even the begin- 
nings of genuine conviction. And where there is momentary con- 
viction — we have all observed examples of this — it may be wiped 
from the memory, like the pencil-marks upon the slate, within an 
hour's time. Suppose, however, conviction to have been produced 
— and preserved. There is still a gap before action is reached. 
Ordinarily, especially in the young, some amount of realization is 
requisite in order to bring about action, if forces of any strength 
are marshalled in opposition. But information poured into the 
mind from without is not the most efficient instrument for the pro- 
duction of a realizing sense of the demands of a situation which 

2 Our entire theory of the influence of authority upon moral ideals 
needs a thorough overhauling. It is in about the same stage to-day that 
the theories (or rather guesses) concerning the mental processes of ani- 
mals were fifty years ago. 



DEVELOPMENT OF MORAI, THOUGHTFULNESS 5 

the child meets in the course of actual experience. Consequently 
there often remains a great gulf between moral instruction and 
moral practice, the existence of which its enemies have not been 
slow to observe and proclaim. 

The system of moralization through training to action, has, in 
its turn, limitations equally serious. Some of them were pointed 
out above in the presentation of the need, on the part of the young, 
for knowledge about the moral life. There are others just as far- 
reacliing. The aim of this method is to produce habits of action. 
But habit merely means doing what you have done before. What 
starts the habit? Is it fear of punishment of one sort or another? 
If so, when the pressure is removed from the young person on his 
leaving school — we are not speaking of those, who, like certain 
soldiers, have been subjected to that kind of pressure for a quarter 
of a century — he is practically certain to relapse in the face of 
temptation. The members of the athletic teams of our high schools 
are not allowed to smoke during the training season. Do they, or 
do they not, return to their smoking after they have " broken 
training " ? Our high school principals have but one answer. 
Habits of promptness, neatness, order, etc., are fairly well en- 
forced in our American schools. Do business men who employ the 
boys fresh from the schools find these qualities ingrained in them? 
So far from it, that there is nothing but complaints at their ab- 
sence. I have had occasion to observe the effects upon the pupils 
of the training given by military schools, after these pupils have 
become students at the university. In the majority of cases — 
not all — one or two j^ears are sufficient to remove all traces of 
the training so carefully enforced in such matters as order and 
neatness. Suppose the graduate of such a school has been taught 
in this external fashion, both at school and at home, to tell the 
truth. He enters the employment of a man who orders him to lie 
to his customers. The penalty is dismissal. If the position is a 
specially promising one, how long will the opposition of a merely 
mechanically acquired habit like this, last? Evidently when a 
young man leaves school he must go forth equipped not merely 
with habits, but also with so profound a sense of the importance 
of the modes of conduct which they represent that he will 
value Ihem more highly than what he may lose by his loyalty to 
them. 

The formation of habits, then, in the fashion recommended 



6 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

by Locke in his Thoughts on Education, and all too faithfully fol- 
lowed by many teachers to this day — the formation of habits in 
this fashion is but one step in the solution of a great problem. It 
creates at best a machine which when well started would doubtless 
run on forever if it were not for the existence of friction. But 
morality involves a conflict with opposing forces, and in this we 
must depend not upon inertia but life. What is required, therefore, 
is a spirit of positive and ardent devotion to moral ideals. This 
alone can beget that loyalty to goodness which prompts to en- 
durance for its sake. " No heart is pure that is not passionate; 
no virtue is safe that is not enthusiastic," writes the author of 
JEcce Homo. Not that it will ever be possible to dispense with 
the training, whether self-imposed or imposed by the parent or 
teacher, that issues in habit. The ideal must make a channel by 
which it habitually passes over into action, or the outcome will be 
a weak, nerveless sentimentalist, a nuisance — or worse — to 
others, and a curse to himself. But if the habit is to stand the test 
of time the channel must be made by the ideal. To create a system 
of habits rooted in ideals, this, and nothing less than this must be 
the aim of moral education. 

For the development of these ideals the English seem to rely 
very largely upon " the atmosphere of the school." Here, again, 
is something which is not merely good but also indispensable, as 
far as it goes. But it is far from sufficient. The individual leans 
upon public opinion. When that support is taken away is it certain 
that he will be found to have learned to walk alone? I think not. 
Will he have developed independence and intelligence of judg- 
ment? Will he exhibit the old habits when transplanted to new 
fields ? Mr. H. Bompas Smith answers the first of these last two 
questions squarely in the negative. The second he answers by 
saying that the pupils do not apply the principles in which they 
have been exercised in the school to their duties as citizens.^ If 
so, is it likely that they apply them in any marked degree to such 
fields as their vocations? 

It has been sought to improve matters by introducing oppor- 
tunities for mutual helps in the life of the pupils, whether in their 
play or in their school work. Again this is valuable but 
insufficient. In class room work of practically any sort, great care 

3 See Moral Instruction and Training in Schools, edited by M. E. Sad- 
ler, Vol. I, p. 118, ff. 



DEVELOPMENT OF MORAL THOUGHTFULNESS 7 

must be taken that the help offered by one pupil to another is not 
of the indiscriminate kind which pauperizes the recipient, and the 
constant necessity incumbent upon the teacher to see that this 
precaution is observed materially narrows the range of benefac- 
tions that may properly be permitted. But even where they are 
permissible, at the best such services can ordinarily be nothing 
more than mere courtesies, costing the giver little, developing, be- 
yond question, his " good nature," but making few more serious 
calls upon character than the ordinary amenities of polite society. 
Much has been said of the value of common work for a common 
end. At the great -negro industrial school at Tuskegee, Alabama, 
founded by Booker T. Washington, the pupils have built with their 
own hands all but one or two of the buildings. This hard toil, 
continued for months, lasting several hours a day, carried on for 
a common cause, may well have strengthened in the best of them 
the enthusiasm for service. But they were making real sacrifices 
of time and energy, and not as a piece of moral gymnastics, but 
as the only means by which absolutely necessary accommodations 
could be provided for themselves and their successors. Such con- 
ditions the ordinary school can, under the most favorable circum- 
stances, only faintly duplicate. But as the cause is, so will be the 
effect. 

Our conclusion is that to obtain the largest results, the meth- 
ods now most frequently employed must be supplemented by others. 
We shall present the claims and describe the procedure of what we 
consider the most important of these. 

Probably no teacher of the nineteenth century was so inti- 
mately acquainted with the nature of the school boy as Arnold of 
Rugby. Certainly none accomplished so much for the training of 
his character. Arnold writes in one of his letters : * " When I look 
around upon boys or men, there seems to me some one point or 
quality which distinguishes really noble persons from ordinary ones ; 
it is not religious feeling, it is not honesty or kindness ; but it seems 
to me to be moral thoughtfulness." The reason for this conviction 
is doubtless to be found in the following statement from a sermon 
preached in Rugby chapel: ^ " He who does not think must surely 
do one of two things — he must submit himself entirely to be 

4 The Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, by Arthur Penrhvn 
Stanley, Vol. II, p. 13 (Fifth Edition). 

5 Sermons, Vol. II, No. XII. 



8 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MOUAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

guided by the advice and direction of others, like young children, 
or else he must certainly go wrong." This assertion may not hold 
quite true for that comparatively small class of whom Wordsworth 
sang in his Ode to Duty: 

" Glad hearts ! without reproach or blot 
Who do thy work and know it not." 

But no one can deny that it is commonly wrong action that 
is action along the line of the least resistance; while observation 
and sound theory unite to convince us of the truth of the essential 
element in Arnold's position, namely that it is thought about the 
issues of conduct that most effectively calls forth the ideals which 
are capable of conquering the lower passions and the narrower and 
meaner impulses of our nature. Here, therefore, is suggested a third 
aim, and implicitly a third method of moral education. 

What then is moral thoughtf ulness ? It is at once a power 
and a habit, the power and the habit, namely, of reflecting upon 
the moral issues involved in conduct. He who possesses it is likely, 
in the end, to come into possession of most of the information which 
moral instruction aims to bestow; what he has learned will not be 
forgotten; he will be able to find his way amid circumstances con- 
cerning which his instructor has supplied him with no information, 
and to discover the moral issues at stake in situations concerning 
which his instructor has said nothing. The convictions obtained 
by the use of his own faculties will be his own property, and the 
distinction between what he believes and what he believes he be- 
lieves will disappear. Furthermore what he has gained will be 
seen by him in its concreteness. This means that its content is 
realized and its signiflcanee apprehended. It therefore tends, 
through its hold upon the imagination, to kindle strongly the feel- 
ings, and accordingly has a much increased chance of passing over 
into action. When temptation assails him, he possesses a resource 
which no mere reliance upon habit or public opinion could afford, 
the strength of reasoned conviction. He does not fight for what 
he only vaguely feels, but for clearly recognized and definitely ap- 
praised values. The deliberate aim of seeking the best becomes 
incorporated into his programme of life, with the result, as in the 
case of every clearly conceived and persistently pursued aim, that 
the interests involved grow more and more precious to him with 
the passage of time. Thus three things are accomplished: the sig- 



DEVELOPMENT OF MORAL THOUGHTFULNESS y 

nificance of our every-day actions, their relations to our ideals, are 
uncovered; the kinds of action demanded by our ideals are discov- 
ered; and the ideals themselves, in becoming defined and formu- 
lated and made the object of our solicitude are broadened in range 
and strengthened in their hold upon our affections. 

This method — the method of training conscience, or moral 
education, as it might perhaps be called, in the narrower sense of 
that term, — is not presented as a cure-all. Those who pretend to 
have such wares for sale are charlatans. It is presented as, at 
most points, the most effective method of supplying information 
concerning the moral life, and as a method of training the powers 
which are the ultimate source of reasonable conduct, a method 
without which the undoubtedly indispensable work of training hab- 
its of action will fail to produce the best fruits. 

In discussing the methods to be used in developing moral 
thoughtfulness I shall confine myself to the high school, where 
alone I have observation and experience of my own to serve as the 
basis for conclusions. The average pupil enters the American 
high school at fourteen, and if he completes the course remains 
four years. The methods appropriate for the first year are quite 
different from those that should be employed in the last two or 
three. Limitations of space compel me to confine myself to the 
latter. 

The power and the habit of reflecting upon the moral issues of 
life can of course be developed only by exercise. The procedure 
employed will accordingly be systematic class discussion, a discus- 
sion led, but never dominated by the teacher. These discussions 
must be preceded by careful preparation on the part of the pupil. 
To develop the habit of passing snap-shot opinions upon moral 
matters would be worse than to attempt to do nothing at all in this 
field. Ordinarily the subject matter will be supplied by a series 
of questions, which will be mimeographed or printed and dis- 
tributed to the pupils in advance. The students should be urged 
not merely to reflect upon them seriously by themselves, but to 
talk them over with their class-mates and parents. There are 
cases where this has led to the first serious discussion about life 
between the boy and the father. 

Three great questions lie at the foundation of all the more 
specific ones. The first one is: What, in the circumstances under 
consideration, is the right course of action? In order to answer 



10 SECOND INTERNATIONAL, MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

this, the pupils must be trained to discover just what these circum- 
stances are in each case. For example, a high school student is 
informed that one whom he has hitherto regarded as his friend 
has been lying about him in order to wrest from him some class 
or athletic honor. The question thereupon arises, What are the 
real circumstances .'' The class must be led to discover for itself 
— and this can be done even with thirteen year old children — 
that the victim, after having assured himself that the report is 
true, is bound to ask and answer the following questions: (a) Did 
he really mean to wrong me (e. g.. Was he clearly conscious that 
what he was saying about me was not true?), (b) Were his state- 
ments made deliberately, or on the spur of the moment.'' (c) Are 
there any extenuating circumstances in the case, which I should 
expect others to apply to me, in a like situation, in passing judg- 
ment upon me? (d) Have I been wronging him (or others) in 
any way which would explain and in part extenuate his action? 
(e) Is it possible that he is already repentant? (f) Is there any- 
thing in his home life or other surroundings that should make me 
judge him more leniently for this fault than I ought to judge my- 
self for a similar offense? (g) Has he done me favors in the 
past, or shown good qualities which now I ought not to forget? 
These questions form the prolegomena, but the necessary prole- 
gomena, to the farther problem of how I ought to treat the wrong 
doer. 

Again, the problem of the nature of the circumstances is 
sometimes that of one's power really to serve in the instance under 
consideration; and the discussion of it may open up the entire field 
of self-knowledge. Or again it may be. What are the needs — the 
real needs — of the parties who make up the given social situation ? 
This, of course, is the problem of opportunity. 

The second fundamental question: What is the true nature of 
the right and the wrong course of action, respectively? The an- 
swer to this will be found to involve the use of two categories, 
similarity and difference, and cause and effect. For example, can 
the action under discussion be classified as cowardice, or lack of 
chivalry, or " sponging " ? Is it at bottom a case of base selfish- 
ness, or disloyalty? Subsumption under any one of these head- 
ings will make the action, in a healthy nature, the immediate object 
of a vigorous abhorrence. In pursuing this subject proper atten- 
tion will be given to the common forms of false subsumption, as 



DEVELOPMENT OF MORAL THOUGHTFULNESS 11 

ifoolhardiness with the devotion to duty which calls for courage, 
and the prodigality of the spendthrift with generosity. Far deeper 
go the questions concerning cause and eifect: What will be the 
direct and the indirect effects of adopting each of the possible 
alternatives permitted by the situation, upon the happiness and 
character of other persons? What will be the direct and the in- 
direct effects upon the character and happiness of myself? 

The third set of questions concerns the attainment of the will 
to do what is recognized to be right. It includes the following: 
Wbat are the dangers and temptations to which I am especially 
subjected because of my circumstances, temperament, tastes, or 
character? How can I avoid or conquer these temptations? How 
can I guard against their appearance? Why am I often indiffer- 
ent, or callous, or even positively malicious ? How can I strengthen 
or weaken the tendencies in me to good or evil respectively? What 
reasons are there for attempting to do so? 

It goes without saying that these three sets of problems can- 
not be kept entirely separate. We cannot ask what is right in a 
given case vdthout inquiring about effects; we cannot seek for the 
reasons for attempting to better one's character without going into 
this same problem of effects; we cannot learn how to control the 
temper without finding that first one must discover precisely what 
the situation is in its completeness, and secondly, what will be the 
effects upon self and others of indulging in angry feelings or 
revengeful actions. Nevertheless the distinctions are not without 
value as points of view. It seems to me that even in the high 
school we should start, as far as possible, from the code of morals 
accepted in the community about us. If so, the proper procedure 
is to take up the specific situation under examination and ask, 
What is its real nature, what opportunities does it offer? How 
are my physical, intellectual, and temperamental equipment, and 
the demands of other situations, related to these opportunities? 
The next step is to trace the effect of failure and of success in 
meeting the demands of the situation which is being studied. If 
this is properly managed, the desire will arise in the better natures 
to be able to meet such situations successfully when they arise in 
actual life, and they will accordingly wish to discover how the 
necessary power is to be obtained. 

At some points, of course, the generally accepted code is 
plainly inadequate. In such instances we can reach the better 



12 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

view by arguing from analogy. Thus it is everywhere recognized 
that the physician must serve his patient to the best of his ability, 
even if that patient is too poor to pay the regular fees. Again 
universal condemnation would be expressed for a captain that de- 
liberately refused to respond to the call of a ship for help. On 
the basis of judgments such as these, the pupil can be led to see 
the duty of service involved in the pursuit of every vocation. 

The above questions, however, serve merely to indicate the 
general outlines of the course. Each topic will have its own special 
questions. The following, dealing with the subject of veracity, 
may serve as examples: 1 (a) Is it possible to lie by other means 
than the use of words, for instance by actions? (b) Can a person 
lie by keeping silent? (c) By making no statement not in itself 
literally true, and yet omitting certain of the facts in the case? 
(d) Did the boy lie who came home at three o'clock in the morn- 
ing, and told his father the next day that he had come in at a 
quarter of twelve (three being a quarter of twelve?) (e) What, 
then, is a lie? 2. May a statement made on insufficient evidence 
be a lie? 3. What are the consequences of a detected lie, in 
virtue of its detection, upon (a) the victim, (b) third parties, in- 
cluding, in the end, the community, and (c) the person himself 
who lied ? 4. Do we, by lying, increase — if detected — the 
chances that others will lie to us? 5. What may be the effects 
of a lie, whether detected or not, upon the victim? 6. If the lie 
has passed undetected, are there no consequences to the agent 
similar in kind to those discovered under 3 (c) ? [Refers to the 
fact that knowledge that a man has told the truth to his own hurt 
is the great source of our confidence in his veracity. Therefore 
he who lies to save himself from loss or pain has at least lost an 
opportunity of increasing the confidence which others repose in 
him.] 7. What are the effects of a lie, whether detected or not, 
upon the character of the agent? 8. Does the habit of lying 
tend to make us unreliable in our statements, even when we intend 
to speak the truth? 9. What are the effects of lying upon our 
confidence in others? 10. What are the effects of exaggerated 
statements, known by all parties to be exaggerated (for instance, 
a person overwhelms you with expressions of his gratitude at 
some trivial favor)? 11. Does even a justifiable lie — assum- 
ing there is such a thing — have any of the bad consequences 
already discovered? 12. Is a lie ever justifiable? 13. Should 



DEVELOPMENT OF MORAL, THOUGHTFULNESS 13 

we phrase the last question, " May I ever lie " ? or should we 
rather inquire " Is it ever necessary for me to lie ? And what is 
the difference between these two formulations? 14. May it be 
our duty to avoid the appearance of deceit, even when we are not 
being guilty of any deception? Make some suggestions as to 
ways in which this may be done in specific instances. 15. By 
what devices do people often try to conceal from themselves the 
fact that they are lying? 16. Why are they often genuinely 
angry when other persons tax them with IjHing? 17. Why is it 
considered a deadly insult deliberately to call a man a liar? 18. 
WTiat are the most common temptations to lie? 19. How can one 
avoid or conquer these temptations and thus build up a truthful 
character? 20. What is apt to be the effect upon one's habits 
of veracity of over-indulgence in eating or laziness? What the 
effect of self-control in matters of eating, industry, willingness to 
bear pain or to suffer the loss of amusements for a good reason? 
— Give reasons for all answers, and supply illustrations wherever 
possible. 

Courses in morals have hitherto dealt solely with duties. We 
shall find it desirable, however, to enrich them by the addition of a 
survey of life from the point of view of its values. By this is 
emphatically not meant a presentation of the conflicting claims of 
Hedonism and Perfectionism, or of any other ethical " isms " what- 
ever. What is proposed is rather an examination of the different 
good things in life (bona), with a view to training the pupil to 
form some estimate of their relative value, and to discovering the 
conditions upon which their attainment depends. Our list of sub- 
jects will include the pleasures of sense and amusements, " com- 
fort "as an end in itself, success in the conventional sense of get- 
ting ahead of other people, social position, the glow and high spir- 
its that are the product of perfect health, the beautiful in nature 
and art, the world of knowledge, work, friendship and love 
(<^::d) the enthusiasm for moral ideals, and, where desired, the 
religious life. We may conclude with a study of the relation of 
wealth to the attainment of these different ends. 

The study of this subject should be introduced into our course, 
first because of the direct contribution it may make to the welfare 
of our pupils; in the second place because their conceptions of 
value will, through imitation and similar forces, help to determine 
the ideals of others, and, later in life, as heads of families and as 



il ■" 



14* SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

citizens of the state, will guide, in large measure, their policy in 
such matters as education and, to a certain extent, social legislation. 

In the third place the possession of the various goods has as 

will appear from a moment's reflection — a far-reaching series of 
effects upon character. Sometimes the effects are indirect, but they 
are none the less important. Thus a common interest in the world 
of beauty or knowledge is a very effective bond of union between 
husband and wife, and thereby, of course, strengthens the marriage 
tie. Furthermore satisfaction in life, as such, apart from its 
special sources, has normally a most beneficent effect upon char- 
acter, as tending to develop a kindly feeling toward one's fellow- 
men, whereas dissatisfaction and disappointment tend to produce 
feelings of self-pity, envy, and hatred. In the fourth place the 
pursuit of the most seductive, and at the same time the least sat- 
isfying goods, the pleasures of sense, comfort, social position, and 
" success," together with their necessary condition in most circum- 
stances, wealth, is the source of the greater part of the wrong- 
doing in the world. Finally the study proposed will disclose the 
fact that possession of some of the most precious of these goods 
is open to man only in proportion as he is pure in heart and un- 
selfish in deed. This is notably true of friendship and love, as 
was long ago pointed out by Aristotle. 

What seems to have proved a satisfactory way of presenting 
this subject is the following: As the basis of work an essay is 
taken by some careful student of human life. This is mimeo- 
graphed or printed and placed in the hands of the pupils, together 
with a series of questions on the text. These questions are not 
intended to test the amount of memorizing which the pupil has 
done. They are intended first to elicit the meaning of the writer; 
second, to modify or correct his statements, wherever necessary; 
and finally to supplement them. The essay, in other words, is 
intended merely to start the pupil thinking. As an illustration 
a treatment of friendship is herewith presented. It is based upon 
selections from Books VIII and IX of Aristotle's Nicomachean 
Ethics. In this case a few explanatory notes upon the text will 
have to be added for the benefit of the student, dealing chiefly 
with the author's use of terms. 

1. Can you think of other reasons for valuing friendship than those 
here given? If you can, observe whether in the text which follows they 
have been anticipated in principle or not. 2. It is easy enough to see 



DEVELOPMENT OF MORAL THOUGHTFULNESS 15 

why we should congratulate a man who has many friends, but why should 
we praise him? 3. What are the two grounds on which, in Chapter I, 
Aristotle declares friendship to be valuable? Cf. Bacon's discussion of this 
subject in his Essay on Friendship (No. 27). 4-. State the definition of 
friendship given in Chap. 11. 5. Ullustrate Aristotle's distinction (in 
Chap. Ill) between caring for a person because of his usefulness to you, 
because of the pleasure he may give you, and because you admire him. 
Does this throw any light upon the distinction between the acquaintance and 
the friend in the proper sense of the word friend? 6. Is this statement 
of the grounds for friendship complete, i. e., if the ground upon which 
the third kind of friendship is based is admiration, can we not admire a 
person for other qualities besides his character? T. Is it true that only 
those who possess a moral quality can admire it in others, e. g., that only 
the brave admire courage? 8. Can you add anything to what Aristotle 
says about the importance of the moral element in friendship? 9. Is it 
true that admiration can by itself create friendship and keep it alive? 
Does Aristotle say it can? 10. Is it true that the good man is also useful 
to his friends and a pleasant companion? 11. Show that both parties to a 
genuine and permanent friendship must be good men. 12. If Aristotle's 
general account of the basis of friendship is true, and the best friendships 
are possible only among the most highly developed persons, can a business 
man who slaves night and day in order to become rich, or, on the other hand, 
a mere idler have good friends and be a good friend? 13. Cicero, in his 
Treatise on Friendship, Chapter VI, asserts that the existence of another 
condition of friendship, not yet explicitly mentioned. Friendship, he says, 
consists in " a perfect conformity of opinion on all religious and civil (social 
and political) subjects, united with the highest degree of mutual esteem 
and aifection." Is this conformity of opinion absolutely essential to friend- 
ship? 14. Aristotle asserts that the third kind of friendship (that based 
on goodness) is necessarily permanent. Is this true? (a) Can it survive 
radical changes of opinion on the part of either friend? (b) the growth 
of one mind beyond the powers of the other? (c) the desire for novelty, 
for new minds to explore? 15. (Chap. V) Show that when evil reports 
circulate about a man of tried character, it will be those among his friends 
who are the best men who will be the last to believe them. 16. Can friend- 
ship survive the long continued separation of the friends? To answer this 
question get clearly before the mind the distinction between the friend and 
the well-wisher. 17. Is it true that in the friendships between the good 
"complaints and bickerings" are excluded? (Book VIII, Chap. XV.) 18. 
If it takes time to create friendship, what is to be said of the advantages 
of friendships formed in youth? What are in general the advantages of 
such friendships? What are the disadvantages? 19. Can we apply these 
principles to true friendships between members of the same family? 20. 
Why is it that family affection or friendship is not more common? 21. 
Give a list of the minor causes in the way of mistakes in daily intercourse 
and of defects of character not yet enumerated which tend to destroy 
friendship and affection. 

The University of Wisconsin. 



16 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL, EDUCATION CONGRESS 



SKETCH OF A COURSE OF ETHICAL DEVELOPMENT 
EXTENDING THROUGH LIFE 

Dr. Felix Abler. 

The principal thought embodied in the following outline is 
that the life of a human being from the point of view of its 
ethical aim, should be regarded as a series of ascending terraces, 
each succeeding one rising above its predecessors. 

This view of ethical development — it may be called the ver- 
tical view — is in sharp contrast to the prevailing horizontal view. 
According to the latter, the ethical demands are practically iden- 
tical in all periods of life, whatever the circumstances in which the 
individual may be placed. According to the former, each period 
of life has its distinctively dominant ethical note. In each period 
some one duty or set of duties rises paramount, some one ethical 
aspect shines out, some special ethical lesson is to be learned. The 
ultimate aim, indeed, remains the same: it is the summit of the 
mountain towards which the successive terraces rise. It is ever 
in view, it is always the goal. The chief ethical rule also remains 
unchanged. But the successive applications of it to new relations 
are not mere illustrations: rather are they revelations of the deeper 
meaning of the rule and they lead to a more penetrating insight 
into the nature of the ethical aim itself. 

The importance of these considerations as marking a new 
attitude towards the problem of moral education is evident. Those 
who adhere to the horizontal view will think of moral education 
chiefly as concerned with the teaching and training of the young. 
" Moral education " means for them the imparting of a certain 
body of moral doctrine and the fixing of appropriate habits. And 
the task of the moral educator will seem to be approximately fin- 
ished when he has furnished the rising generation, once and for 
all, with the lamp which enables them to see their way. It is true, 
no one will deny that moral self-education must be continued 
throughout the whole of life. But for those who take the attitude 
indicated, moral progress through self-education simply means in- 
creased power to hold fast the principles inculcated in one's youth, 
greater promptness in responding to the call of duty and a more 



ETHICAI/ DEVELOPMENT THROUGHOUT LIFE 17 

delicate tact in applying the recognized principles to the unravel- 
ing of tangled moral problems. It does not mean gaining new 
light on the meaning and content of the ethical aim itself. 

If, on the contrary, one takes the " terrace view " of ethical 
development, the problem of the moral education of the young 
assumes an entirely new and different aspect. The moral educa- 
tion of the young will then be the first introductory stage of a long 
development, and it is obvious that the first stage cannot be wisely 
or adequately planned without distinct reference to what is to 
follow. The attempt, at least, will have to be made to map out 
the entire course and system of ethical development with a view 
of fitting the first beginnings into this system. For each stage is 
to yield certain gains that are to be taken up and to be further 
ripened in the succeeding stage. And it is plain that without a 
more or less explicit conception of the series as a whole, the work 
done on any one term of the series will fail of its best results. 
" Without the truth," says Thomas a Kempis, " there is no know- 
ing; without the way, there is no going." The truth in this case 
is the knowledge of the contribution which each period of life 
may be expected to yield toward the development of human per- 
sonality. Without this truth, there is no real knowing in respect 
to the task of the moral educator, be he concerned with the educa- 
tion of the young or with the problems of adult self-education. 
And without the way there is no going, and the truth must point 
the way. 

The lack of any distinctly conscious perception of the moral 
problems that stand out in the different periods and relations of 
life is, to the writer's mind, one of the chief causes, not only 
of moral failure and shipwreck in individual instances, but of the 
generally low moral estate of men at the present day when com- 
pared with their notable achievements in the intellectual field. In 
any case, the movement for moral education, so long as its point 
of view is mainly restricted, as at present, to children of the school 
age, will remain shorn of its brightest promise and destitute of the 
sublimity of suggestion which rightly belongs to it. 

To submit this idea is the principal object of this paper. By 
way of illustration, an attempt will be made to sketch in rough 
outline a course of ethical development extending through life. 
The periods contemplated are: Childhood, Adolescence, Early and 
Later Middle Life, Old Age, or the Period of Abdication, and the 



18 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

last stage of all, that of the Relinquishment of the Finite Life. 
Be it remembered that what is here undertaken is not a complete 
system, but the presentation of certain germinal thoughts which, 
during a somewhat prolonged course of public ethical teaching, 
have impressed themselves on the writer's mind. 

The following short preliminary statement will put before 
the reader the point of view from which what follows (the whole 
course) is conceived. The ethical aim is the development of per- 
sonality. Personality is to be distinguished from individuality. 
The individual, insofar as ethicized^ is a personality. Empirical 
man, with his defects and his qualities, is an individual, — one of 
a kind. Empirical man, insofar as he is transformed in subjection 
to the rational ideal, is a personality. 

This difference involves also the fundamental diiference be- 
'■y tween value and worth. An individual has value, a personality 
has worth. Value applied to human beings is the property which 
one man has of satisfying the needs or wants of another. Worth 
is the intrinsic preciousness or worthwhileness which belongs to a 
man on his own account. The concept of worth is altogether an 
ideal concept. To ascribe worth to men is to ascribe to them an 
ideal character in no wise justified by their actual conduct. It is 
to invest them with a glory which their performances nowise war- 
rant. It is to see them in a manner suh specie aeternitatis ; that is 
to say, as indispensable components of a rational universe. The 
concept of worth is founded on a postulate, rather than on a fact; it 
is based on the assumption that there exists in every man poten- 
tially some unique distinctive excellence, some mode of necessary 
being induplicable outside himself. Let us adopt for a moment 
the sublime fiction of the harmony of the spheres, only replacing 
the shining stars by mental and moral beings, stars in a spiritual 
universe. Let us assume that there is an infinite number of such 
beings. Let us assume that each of these beings is capable of 
sounding forth a divine note expressive of his inmost nature, with- 
out which the worldwide harmony would be incomplete. Let us 
assume further that each of these musical utterances has the quality 
of eliciting in unmost purity their genuine note from each of the 
infinite members of this innumerable multitude of beings: we shall 
then have a kind of pictorial statement of the thought here pre- 
sented. We shall also be helped to apprehend imaginatively the 
meaning of the formula which is now to be offered as the chief 



ETHICAL DEVELOPMENT THROUGHOUT LIFE 19 

ethical principle or rule, controlling and determining the course of 
ethilopment in all the successive periods. So act as to release the 
best in others, and thereby you will release the best that is in your- 
self. Or, So act as to assist in bringing to light the unique excel- 
lence in others, and thereby you rvill bring to light the unique excel- 
lence that is in yourself. Or, more precisely still, So act as to evoke 
in another the efficient idea of himself as a member of the infinite 
organism,, and thereby corroborate in thyself the same efficient idea 
with respect to thyself. For it must be remembered that the latent 
distinctive excellence which is here taken as the foundation of 
worth or personality is not a static, but a dynamic quality. It is 
not to be discovered by isolating man, by seeing him detached from 
his fellows. The idea of worth is a social idea. It deals with man 
in his relations. It sees in him a being essentially active, whose 
very life consists in affecting the life of others. Worth, there- 
fore, may be defined as that which provokes worth in others, dis- 
tinctive excellence as that which calls forth a reaction in the direc- 
tion of their distinctive excellence in others. Ethics becomes a 
science of reactions. -"^ 

Regarding, then, the pilgrimage of the human spirit through 
time as a kind of progressus ad Parnassum, with an ever-expanding 
outlook on the ethical field and with the finest ethical results to 
come at the end; regarding the ethical aim of life as that of find- 
ing oneself through right penetration into the life of others, and 
setting before us that the ethical task consists in taking empirical 
human nature as it exists and transforming it, we quickly perceive 
that in each of the successive periods the empirical facts are such 
as necessarily to give rise to specific ethical tasks. The ethical 
task cannot be the same for the immature child and the full-grown 
man in the complete exercise of his mental faculties. It cannot 
be quite the same for the single and the married. It cannot be 

1 For a fuller account of the positions condensed in the above, the 
reader is referred to the author's article in the International Journal of 
Ethics, October, 1911. It may be asked, with what right the private ethical 
phiiosophy of the author is thus submitted for the use of those who may 
not at all agree with his point of view. The answer is that ethical philoso- 
phies or theories are to be judged by their fruit; that is, by the practical 
directions to which they lead. If these be sound, or even suggestive, they 
may be sccerced to that extent by those who would wholly reject the 
premises from wiiich they are derived. In this way much of the ethical 
progress whi ;h mankind have actually achieved has been brought about. 
We adopt cei\;aln of the fruits of Stoicism without endorsing the Stoic 
pantheism. We accept many of the Christian precepts without necessarily 
subscribing to the formulated Christian creed. 



20 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

the same for those who follow different callings, each calling hav- 
ing its own moral perils, its own moral opportunities. It cannot 
be quite the same for one who is charged with the full responsi- 
bilities of active life and for one who is permitted to spend the 
remainder of his days as a spectator. It is of capital importance 
that these problems, these perils and opportunities, should be ana- 
lyzed and presented in definite terms. Here, as has been said, only 
a few hints will be attempted. 

CHILDHOOD : 

The salient fact about a child is its dependence on adults. 
The ethical task in this period is to profit by the dependence in 
order to lay the foundations of future independence. The question 
at the outset is (and it will constantly recur later on) : How can 
the circumstances in which the human being is placed, the acci- 
dents of this temporal development and estate, be utilized so as to 
promote unique distinctive excellence, which is the goal.^ 

As far as the first period is concerned, the means to be em- 
ployed seem to be chiefly the following. Bring home to the child 
the fact that there is such a thing as a kingdom of worth, a society 
in which moral striving counts as the highest form of human activ- 
ity. This can be done, and can only be done, by the worth which 
shines out from the faces, the speech and conduct of the adults 
with whom the child is brought into contact. Spiritual ideas at 
this stage are far beyond the comprehension of the young, but 
spiritual impressions, to be retained and understood later on, are 
capable of being received. The afflatus of a moral world should 
radiate upon the child's life from the persons of its elders. The 
key to moral education of the young, as the preponderant majority 
of writers on the subject agree, is the moral attitude of those who 
undertake to educate the young. And by the moral attitude we are 
to understand principally the unremitting effort in the direction of 
the moral ideal and the reverence that finds its expression in such 
effort. Reverence toward older persons, especially toward parents 
and teachers, is the specific virtue of childhood. Reverence is 
aroused only toward those who themselves revere.^ 

2 Here we have an exemplification of the chief moral rule, Seek to 
release the best in others and thereby you will release it in yourself. Rev- 
erence toward parents is the key virtue in the moral system of childhood. 
In order to awaken this feeling in the child, the parent must revere some- 



ETHICAL DEVELOPMENT THROUGHOUT LIFE 21 

In the next place, the sense of the organic, inseparable re- 
lation with other fellow beings is to be fostered by parental love, 
by a kind of love that is unbought, unmerited as yet, but not there- 
fore unconditioned, a love that may on occasion manifest itself by 
inflicting punishment and pain, and yet is felt to be the disinter- 
ested love, nonetheless. 

Next, the incipient personality of the child is to be honored 
by the strict observance of impartiality and fairness in dealing with 
the child. The actual assertion of personality really involves free- 
dom from the constraint exercised by others. Such freedom, ex- 
cept in extremely limited measure, is not yet possible for a yoimg 
child. Children are dependent and must learn to act under rules 
laid down by their superiors. Being thus in a state of dependence, 
the consciousness of personality and of that moral equality which 
is the mark of personality manifests itself in the demand on their 
part that they shall be treated as equal dependents; that the rules 
which they are compelled to obey shall be applied equally to all 
alike. There is no one thing that children so much resent as un- 
fairness, or undue discrimination in favor of one of their number, 
whether by parents or teachers. There is no subject which school 
children discuss so frequently among themselves as the real or sup- 
posed partiality of one of their teachers, no subject on which they 
refine to such lengths of casuistry. And this should put us on our 
guard with respect to the incalculable injury that may be done by 
deviations from the strict lines of justice in matters that may seem 
to us trivial. It is important not only that we be just in our 
treatment of children, but, as far as possible, that we also seem to 
be just. 

With the help of reverence, love, and equitable rules, the 
children are to acquire those indispensable habits which form the 
substructure of the whole moral edifice of their future lives : the 
habits of self-control, of order, of gentleness and consideration, 
the habit of industry and application, etc. But without the senti- 
ment of reverence, without the filial love that responds to the 
parental love, without the primary respect for equity and law, 
these habits alone will prove but a feeble and treacherous founda- 
tion to build upon. 

It may be added that the child is also to obtain its first initia- 

thing higher than himself and he must be continually growing in reverence, 
in order to give to his child the essential moral preparation. 



22 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

tion into the ideas of the state and of religion chiefly by means of 
the reverberations which these ideas awaken in the life of its elders. 
The piety of parents and teachers, their loyal citizenship, will re- 
flect itself on the feelings of the young. 

adolescence: 

The salient fact about the child is dependence. The outstand- 
ing fact about the adolescent is the craving for independence 
coupled with the necessity for continued dependence because of in- 
experience and immaturity. The ethical task is to use this craving 
as a means of advancing a step toward actual independence. 

At about the age of puberty, a critical change occurs. The 
consciousness of separateness is accentuated. The atom gets loose, 
as it were, from the molecule. The individual escapes or seeks to 
escape from the social context and its constraint. 

The ethical task at this time is to assist the adolescent in 
reconstructing his world, in reintegrating himself into the social 
whole on the basis of consent rather than of compulsion. And here 
there are three kinds of relation that demand particular attention: 
the compulsory relations, the pure choice relations, and the choices 
which eventually lead to compulsory relations. Of the first kind, 
the most important are the filial or family relations. From the 
bonds of filial and fraternal duty no one can ever escape. To 
reconstruct, so far as they are concerned, can only mean to revise, 
to understand more finely, to voluntarily assume that which hitherto 
was more or less imposed from without. The best turn that can 
take place in the relation of adolescents toward parents is based 
on this new voluntariness of attitude. The adolescent is to become 
consciously the companion of the parent. The child ignorantly 
idealizes father and mother, ascribing to them every kind of per- 
fection and regarding them as a kind of earthly providence, as be- 
ings who have no needs of their own but exist to satisfy those of 
others. The point of view of the adolescent is to undergo a change 
in both particulars. The reverence he feels for them is to attach, 
not to the unreal perfections with which he clothes them, but to 
the earnest striving after the nobler things of life which he dis- 
cerns in them. And instead of regarding them as godlike givers, 
free from want and limitation, his eyes are to be opened to see 
their actual needs and the limitations, physical, mental, or social, 
under which they carry on the struggle of life. To assist them, 



ETHICAL DEVELOPMENT THROUGHOUT LIFE 23 

if only by understanding sympathy, should be his highest aim. 

Of the second class, the pure choice relations, friendship is 
the most important. The adolescent should be assisted to the 
right conception of the specific office of friendship in the develop- 
ment of personality. A comparative study of the ideals of friend- 
ship, as held by the Pythagoreans, Aristotle, Kant, Emerson, etc., 
will be found useful. 

Of the choices which eventually lead to compulsory relations, 
the choice of a calling is perhaps the best example. It is true, 
one can select a certain vocation and, finding oneself mistaken, 
later on exchange it for another. Yet the rule should be: initial 
carefulness in the choice, with the presumption of permanent fidel- 
ity to it later on. A broad outlook on the system of human call- 
ings should be opened up at this time, the nature of the different 
callings, the faculties they bring into play, the aptitudes they re- 
quire, should be described; above all, the ideal aim of vocational 
life should be set forth. 

Of the dangers which beset the path of the adolescent, the 
principal one is prematureness, in all its forms, — premature asser- 
tion of independence, leading to defiance of authority and foolish 
contempt for advice; prematureness in the sex relation; premature- 
ness in the attempt to obtain a fugitive notoriety (as in athletic 
contests) by achievements lying within the reach of the mentally 
immature. Undue concentration of effort on these parerga of 
human development tends to sterilize the mind and to prevent 
success later on in the real business of life. The moral educator 
may rest fairly satisfied with his results if he is able to influence 
the young so that they shall be willing to spend endless toil on 
preparation and renounce fruition for the present. The virtue 
of the adolescent is postponement. The reward of the adolescent 
is the noble forecast, the golden vision, of what he may be able to 
accomplish when his powers shall be ripened. 

Of the topics of ethical instruction in this period, the first 
and foremost is the idea of worth. This is the cornerstone of the 
entire ethical edifice. The points to bring out are that inde- 
pendence, or the right of self-determination, is based on the worth 
which is inherent in human nature, and that the worth of any one 
human being is conditioned on the recognition of worth in all 
others.^ 

3 The study of the history of human slavery, the history of the Peasants' 



24 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

Other topics are: 

The re-interpretation of the duties of the family; 

Friendship ; 

The sex-relation; 

The ethics of the vocations; and 

A general preliminary account of the ethics of citizenship.* 

EARLY MIDDLE LIFE: 

Leading Thoughts: 

The work that a man does in his calling is the anvil on which 
he is to beat out his personality. 

The work that a man does is valuable, not chiefly for its 
results, but for its reaction on the development of the worker. 
(See what Wilhelm von Humboldt has to say on the bloom as com- 
pared to the fruit.) 

Every calling is charged with the performance of a certain 
specific kind of social function or service. No one of the various 
functions committed to the various callings has ever yet been ade- 
quately performed, — not that of the physician, of the priest, of 
the artist, of the artisans; not the highest any more than the hum- 
blest. The aim of anyone who enters a calling should be to carry 
forward the service or function committed to it to greater per- 
fection. In order to do this, he must deploy his special gift or 
aptitude. In attempting to do so, he gets possession approximately 
of his special gift or aptitude. In pursuing an objective task, he 
realizes a subjective end. 

The work is rightly done when done in such a way that the 
worker grows mentally and morally in the process of doing it. 

Mental development is promoted when the work suggests new 
ways of doing it, while it is being done, and when each problem 
solved raises up new problems to be solved.^ 

War in Germany and of the long-drawn-out struggle of the laboring 
class for better conditions, is useful as a means of arousing indignation at 
the mistreatment of human beings and serves by reaction to strengthen 
the hold on the student's mind of the idea of the indefeasible dignity and 
worth of man. 

4 In this connection, special emphasis should be laid on the ethical idea 
of the state and on the inspiring moments in the history of the nation, 
rather than on the technical details of the mechanics of government. 

5 The labor question, considered from the ethical point of view, is not 
a question chiefly of the more equable distribution of the product, but of 
changing the conditions of manual labor in such a way as beneficently to 
aflFect the producer. Compare the opportunities in this respect now opening 
in agriculture. 



ETHICAL DEVELOPMENT THROUGHOUT LIFE 25 

The work, if rightly done, must react on the moral as well 
as the mental development of the worker. 

The two go together. It is useless, except provisionally and 
for convenience of discussion, to treat them separately.® 

The total development of the worker is furthered by the 
trinity of his relations to superiors, equals, and inferiors ; to master- 
minds, co-workers, and apprentices. It is in these threefold re- 
lations that the character of a human being is built up. 

Who is a master? The master in one's vocation is the path- 
finder, the epoch-making thinker and doer. He who in the strength 
and illumination of a fresh initiative for a moment catches a 
glimpse of the entire field and measures — though it be from but 
one point of view — its dimensions, sees or senses the whole context 
of its problems. The advantage of mental contact with a master 
is that of being lifted up with him to something of the same eleva- 
tion and extent of outlook. One acquires a profounder insight into 
the nature of the problems, though the particular solutions be 
rejected. One gets the inspiration of the method with which the 
problems in these illustrious instances have been attacked. 

The ancient rule holds true, — " Get thee a master." 

The relation to the master is the key to the other two. The 
co-worker or equal is one who is our master in certain respects, we 
being his followers; and to whom we are masters in other respects, 
he being our follower. 

The relation to the apprentice is to the master that is one day 
to be. 

The great danger that appears in early life, that to which 
the human spirit, striving to attain personality, at this time is 
particularly exposed, is the false estimate put by others upon our 
work, and through our work upon ourselves. We cannot, indeed, 
prevent the formation of false estimates in others' minds, but we 
can avoid falling into the trap of simply accepting them. The 
difficulty, indeed, of here steering the middle course is great. On 
the one side we must respect and bow to the judgment of our fel- 
lows and submit to the sharp edge of their criticism; on the other 
side we must be innovators, and therefore be sure enough of our- 
selves to defy the judgment of the majority of our contemporaries. 

6 Moral and intellectual defects seem to have the same root: the same 
faults which disfigure or narrow a man in point of character wiU be found 
to narrow or deflect his thinking. 



26 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

The trinity of relations above described, and especially that to the 
master-minds, is in this respect our surest safeguard. 

LATER MIDDLE LIFE: 

At this stage of development, the interrelation of one's calling 
to other callings is the preeminent feature. All the different voca- 
tions react upon one another. The progress of the fine arts reacts 
upon that of the handicrafts, and conversely. The physical sci- 
ences are closely interconnected. Science as a whole exercises in- 
timate influence upon philosophy and religion. There is a web 
of cross-relations. 

The chief ethical rule applies: So exercise your calling as to 
quicken the vocational activity of all related callings. Keep well 
within your boundaries. Do not impertinently intrude into your 
neighbor's precincts. Be not a jingo. If you are a scientist, 
for instance, do not seek to extend the scientific method, in im- 
perialistic fashion, over the whole field. But all the same, let the 
touchstone of success within your own lines be this : that the truth 
you have apprehended is found acceptable by those who work in 
different lines; that your life becomes life to them, stimulating 
them to results differentiated from yours. 

The dangers that appear at this time are those of dilettantism 
at one extreme, and crusty, philistine specialism at the other.^ 

OLD age: 

The ethical keynote of this period is right abdication. The 
ethical task is that of making up the balance-sheet of our past, re- 
viewing the whole course we have run, and unflinchingly setting 
down its failures as well as its partial successes. There are very 
few men who would not plan their life otherwise than they have 
actually conducted it, if they had the opportunity. Mistakes per- 
haps were made by others in our early training. Other aberrations 
there have been for which we have no one to blame but ourselves, 
due to errors of judgment or moral remissness. We have followed 
ignes fatui. We have mistaken our admirations for our capabilities. 

7 The problem, how to be delivered from the disastrous effects of 
specialism, how to know something well without forfeiting the outlook on 
the whole, is in some sense the most urgent problem of our times. Simpli- 
fication, and the conscious interrelating of the central principles of one's 
work to the central principles of others' work, seem to point the way out. 



ETHICAL, DEVELOPMENT THROUGHOUT LIFE 27 

We have fought, for years perhaps, tinder false flags, or with watch- 
words on our lips, of party or creed, which never really expressed 
our inmost tendencies. 

The ethics of old age is the ethics of abdication. Abdication 
implies, besides vacating our place, making the way easier for our 
successor. It has been said that no one can really transmit the 
benefits of his experience to another; that every new generation 
must learn the painful lessons afresh. But we can at least fa- 
cilitate the process of learning these lessons, especially by improv- 
ing the methods of education and training that obtain in our calling. 
And we can in addition school ourselves to take the right spiritual 
attitude toward our successor, whoever he may be, the attitude of 
welcome towards one of whom we hope that he will eclipse us. 
Morituri te salutamus! 

At this point it will be necessary to intercalate a few re- 
marks concerning the social institutions: the family, the state, and 
the church, and the contributions toward the growth of personality 
which they are fitted to furnish. The family, the state, and the 
church run in a parallel series alongside of the line of develop- 
ment that has been traced. In the family, we are included from 
the beginning: first in that to which we belong as sons and daugh- 
ters; afterwards in that to which we belong as fathers and 
mothers. The family is the organ of the spiritual as well as of 
the physical reproduction of the human race. The contribution of 
the family to personality consists in the obligation we are under, 
as parents, to focalize the results of our development, in order 
thereby to enkindle spiritual life in our offspring. 

The functions of mother and father in this respect are diverse. 
Tihe man seems to represent the factor of differentiation, the woman 
that of integration. The process of accommodation that goes on 
between them quickens the seed of worth in the young. 

The state, likewise, envelops us from the beginning and we 
lay our dust in our country's soil. The state, ethically considered, 
is the organization of the vocational groups, designed, by the inter- 
play between them, to give expression to the aptitudes or gifts of a 
people, with a view of building up the type of civilization which 
that people is fitted to produce. The moral profit which the in- 
dividual derives from citizenship is the instruction he receives in 
the true nature of what is called " the public welfare " (to be de- 
fined as the sum of the conditions favorable to the creative activity 



S8 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

jiist described), and the acceptance of this public aim into his 
private will.® 

The church, also, is one of the indispensable social institu- 
tions. If at the present day it no longer includes the whole of our 
life, that is so because, in many cases, as an instrument it has 
broken in the hands of those who desired to use it. The church, 
ethically speaking, is the vessel of the Holy Grail, in which are 
forever to be generated the ultimate ideals of mankind, those cos- 
mic ideals which spring from the social ideals and in turn corrobo- 
rate them. 

The space at my command forbids more than this bare 
enumeration of crucial thoughts ; nor is there room to enlarge, as 
it would be right to do, on the help to be expected from the various 
empirical sciences, — the science of which Mill called ethology, 
the psychology of character, the social sciences, etc., which must be 
looked to to fill in with appropriate content the mere outlines 
sketched above. I hasten to say a few words of the last stage 
of all. 

ON THE brink: 

The end is in sight. We have finished our pilgrimage. Have 
we, then, reached our goal? Have we achieved personality? We 
are as far from having done so as ever. We measure as we have 
never done before the distance that separates the finite from the 
infinite. The paradox that we forever seek to attain that which 
under earthly conditions is unattainable, remains. The unique, 
distinctive excellence, latent, but unapparent in us, is unapparent 
still. It is a star that shines above us in the highest heavens and 
we are as beings sunk far, far down in the depths of an abyss, 
looking de profundis toward that star. But it is our star, our es- 
sential self, the rays that descend to us compelling and ever more so; 
we are subject to it and therefore akin to it. 

Thus, we have not, indeed, realized our ideal, but we have 
realized the reality of our ideal. It sul)sists in the world of true 

8 Early married life corresponds to the first half of the vocational 
period, in which the worker acquires a certain degree of superiority and 
becomes master of the technique of his calling up to date. The second half 
of married life corresponds to the later vocational period, in which the inter- 
relations are the conspicuous feature. At this period the parent has to deal 
with the problem of directing his growing sons or daughters into their ap- 
propriate vocational lines. In the state, as ideally conceived, there should 
also be degrees of citizenship, corresponding to the ripeness achieved. 



MORAL EDUCATION IN THE LIFE OF THE COMMUNITY 29 

being, and we with it. And this is the final outcome of it all, this 
the conviction that brightens our eyes as we stand on the brink. 

TO RECAPITULATE: 

The stages of growth are: 

In childhood, right subj ection ; 

In adolescence, reinterpretation of relations and preparation; 

In early middle life, reaction of the work so as to elicit the 
distinctive gift of the worker; 

In later middle life, quickening reaction upon interrelated 
callings. That which at present is treated as incidental to be 
erected into the cliief conscious end; 

In old age, right summation of life's results and welcome to 
successor; 

On the brink, the right farewell. 

The simile under which life is represented as a hill with an 
upward incline and thereafter a downward slope may be true of 
man physically and even intellectually. But it is not true of him 
spiritually. It need not be. The highest point may be reached 
at the very end. And in this sense the words of Penelope hold 
good: " If, then, the gods make old age the best period of life, 
there is hope of escape from sorrows." 



MORAJL EDUCATION IN THE LIFE OF THE COMMUNITY 

Robert Woods 

During the past quarter century, the sentiment of the American 
people has been definitely shifting from the individualistic concep- 
tions that went with opening up the physical resources of the conti- 
nent to the more distinctively social ideals which are involved in the 
structural upbuilding of the life of the nation. The dominance of 
highly accented individual incentive checked by only a minimum of 
legal or moral restraint from the fullest achievement in bringing 
forth the riches of the land, is passing; the rise of the great new 
motives of service and fellowship can be discerned in a thousand new 
forms of expression. 

This change is most clearly seen in the field of the nurture of 
the new generation. In the older day, only the few fortunate ones 



30 SECOND INTEENATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGBESS 

were educated. To-day, the range of social eiFort is being ex- 
tended to include all children without regard to the economic con- 
dition of their parents ; to provide for the early stages of childhood, 
and even for prenatal care; to cover for each child and youth the 
interests that go with health and recreation ; and carry each through 
the stage of positive training for such a calling in life as his partic- 
ular talents seem to indicate. These extensions of the scope of 
education (though under development as yet only in the more pro- 
gressive sections of the country), indicate significant progress in 
moral evolution on the part of the American people as a whole. 

Into this enlarging process of nurture are being deeply in- 
grafted the principles of service and co-operative association. The 
old education laid too much stress upon ideals of receptivity and 
tended to train up a generation of mere consumers. No doubt a 
part of the gambling tendency — of the desire to gain much while 
giving little — which has been so great an evil in our economic and 
political life, was the result of a type of education which developed 
imperious wants but did not balance them with developed capacity 
and desire to produce the objects of desire. To-day our educational 
system is rearing the producer type of citizen. It is also at every 
stage bringing the children into the experience of loyalty and 
specifically training them in the art of group-association. 

The education of the American people as a whole in the ethics 
of industry and of vocation in general is likewise making substantial 
progress. The justice and the desirability of organization among 
workingmen for the protection and enhancement of their wage 
standards are now generally recognized. The responsibility of the 
leaders in industrial enterprise, first to those who provide their cap- 
ital, and then to the purchasers of their products, — which has in 
both directions been much more definitely established, — is now being 
extended by public sentiment to include the various grades and de- 
grees of the working staff. There is a great variety of experiment 
in the way of mutually helpful relations between employer and 
employe. The duty of the consumer to demand the product of 
honestly and considerately conducted industry is growing among the 
more intelligent ; while a very marked gain in the sense of responsi- 
bility on the part of the housewife as the purchasing agent of her 
household is indicated in the broadly successful national campaigns 
against impure foods and deleterious medicines. 

In politics, the measurable progress in municipal reform which 



MORAL, EDUCATION IN THE LIFE OE THE COMMUNITY 31 

has been made, is the result not so directly of a quickened sense of 
honesty as of a fresh realization that government, and particularly 
municipal government, must be not only pure but, in the large human 
sense, serviceable. The serviceable type of municipal government 
trains, wins and holds an increasing balance of power among the 
electorate, through which the welfare and progress of democracy 
becomes gradually more secure. We are coming to realize what an 
influence for moral education a genuinely democratic government 
may be. 

In the attack upon the various forms of physical and moral 
degeneracy, we have found remarkable suggestion and stimulus in 
the application of the results of medical science, as illustrated, for 
instance, in the systematically and comprehensively organized cam- 
paign against tuberculosis ; or in the new program, which it is hoped 
will be national in its application, for the segregation of the feeble- 
minded. The movement against the evils of alcoholism is the stronger 
for being less emotional and much more strategic; while authorita- 
tive and official studies of prostitution in several of our cities have 
gone far to break the habitual mood of resigned indifference on the 
part of ethically minded people, and to bring home the necessity 
and the possibility of a thoroughgoing program of influence and 
action. 

Widespread economic and political unrest signifies moral vi- 
tality in that it is everywhere accompanied and surrounded by 
friendly and co-operative impulse between man and man. The 
spirit of association is universally present among factory employes, 
among farmers, among business men, among the women of our 
homes ; and in all cases the test of substantial worth in such associa- 
tion is coming to be in the breadth of its motives as affecting the 
general welfare. In a country which includes within its inner life 
all of the world's race problems, the minimizing of friction between 
so many types is a task of oppressive magnitude. The ground for 
hope lies in the solidarity of interest which is gradually gained as 
each racial group establishes itself as a productive factor in the 
community. Of great promise in this direction as in all others, is 
the growth of neighborhood feeling in all our local communities. 
Efforts are everywhere being made to utilize the pride in their 
neighborhood felt by old and young as the basis of organization for 
civic betterment. This revival of the neighborhood as the funda- 
mental unit of public and national life, and the projection of neigh- 



32 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

borhood interests by organized methods into the counsels of city, 
state and nation, is a growing fact which will have profound moral- 
izing influence upon the whole of American civilization. 



SOME MISCONCEPTIONS OF MORAL EDUCATION* 

Henry Neumann 
instructor in education^ ethical culture school, new york 

A GREAT deal of the present-day controversy on the subject of 
moral education springs from certain misconceptions as to the na- 
ture of the schooling proposed in this much-debated suggestion. 

It is said for one thing that since morality is not a product of 
intelligence, moral education, whatever else it may do, must dispense 
with ethical instruction, for this instruction is useless and too often 
positively harmful. Thus Professor Palmer of Harvard objects: 
" What is asked of us teachers, is that we invite our pupils to direct 
study of the principles of conduct, that we awaken their conscious- 
ness about their modes of life, and so by degrees impart a science 
of righteousness. This is theory, ethics; not morals, practice; and 
in my judgment, it is dangerous business with the slenderest chance 
of success. . . . Many matters do not take their rise in knowl- 
edge at all. Morality does not." ^ 

This position is easy to understand. It is indeed a fact that 
life is not shaped by reason alone. Instincts and habits, envy, 
prejudice, laziness, all undoubtedly play just as important a part. 
A boy who has been used to lord it over his imcomplaining sisters 
grows up for that reason into mistaken but firm views of masculine 
superiority, just as the libertine, fixed in his habits of indulgence, 
cannot understand why his " perfectly reasonable " pleasures should 
be condemned. Such also is the case in the doing of the right: 
here, too, the part played by a bare thinking is frequently very 
small. Many of our best acts are as immediate and unreasoned 
as a mother's rushing to her baby at the cry of pain. 

Nevertheless, because a mere process of cognition alone fails 
to bring right conduct, it does not follow that attempts to enlighten 
the judgment by instruction must be frowned upon. Surely to 
trust behavior only to instinct is to rely upon an unsafe guide. 

* Reprinted from International Journal of Ethics, April, 1912. 
iG. H. Palmer, "The Teacher," pp. 36, 37. Reprinted in "Ethical 
and Moral Instruction in Schools." Houghton Mifflin Co. 



SOME MISCONCEPTIONS OF MORAL EDUCATION 33 

Instinct itself needs direction; for it is just as likely to lead us 
wrong as it is to point us aright. It is the experience of all human 
society that children must somehow, at some time or other, be taught 
which innate tendencies to suppress and which to encourage. The 
commonest method is to inflict pain when they let a wrong instinct 
rule; but as they grow older and continue to act out their instincts 
for mischief, this surely is not the only way nor the wisest, to teach 
them how to choose rightly. Can they never be helped even before 
maturity, by appeals to an intelligent understanding of what right 
and wrong conduct mean? 

It is equally mistaken to hold that moral development can be 
entrusted solely to the forming of habits. Every growing life must 
advance by breaking many of its habits, even its good ones; and 
how is this to be done? There comes a time, for instance, when 
the child's beautiful practice of indiscriminate alms-giving must be 
superseded by wiser charity. In every such readjustment, the sig- 
nificance of the new custom must be made clear. If it is to com- 
mend itself, the new line of conduct must at least appear reason- 
able; and here, it would seem, there is a decided call for adult 
counsel. 

A like assistance is needed to make so-called experiences yield 
their best fruit. To get the most out of an " experience," there 
must be more or less understanding of its meaning. A boy who is 
disgruntled because he thinks he is a good pitcher, but is obliged 
to play center-field, may be forced by his comrades to do his al- 
lotted share in the work of his team, and thus, according 
to some teachers, be educated into obedience to a group will. The 
simple fact remains, however, that this experience is of no value 
unless its ethical significance is understood and grasped. Left to 
himself, the lad may get no more out of the situation than a mood 
of ugliness. Far from being " socialized," he may feel nothing 
but anti-social emotions. A word or two of interpretation may do 
much, however, to send the boy back to his undesired post with a 
clearer notion of responsibility and a helpful resolve to live up to it. 
A member of one of the writer's classes told of a pupil who had 
received such help in a situation of this very sort. Disliking his po- 
sition on the school team, the boy had resigned, against the protests 
of his fellows. A month later, he was allowed to play a leading 
role in a performance of Julius Ccesar, where he acquitted himself 
with all credit. His teacher thereupon reminded him of the part 



S4t SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

contributed to his success by the obscure but none the less important 
efforts of the other actors. The boy was ashamed and saw his self- 
ishness in its true light. Whatever the experience, it counts for 
most when its fuller implications are comprehended; and here the 
clearer and wider insight of the teacher may render valuable aid. 
It is no argument against direct and regular instruction to say that 
this instance was simply the interpretation of a very real experi- 
ence. Man, unlike the animal, is able to profit by anticipating ex- 
perience. To be sure, there is always danger that the anticipation 
may be too remote to be effective when the occasion arises; but the 
unwisdom of such an extreme is no proof that a sound middle course 
has no place. 

Thinking, therefore, is by no means to be ignored as a moral 
agency in childhood, even though it is neither the chief source of 
conduct nor the only one. That right attitudes and practices re- 
sult from a complex interplay of forces does not allow us to say 
any more about a single one of these forces than that it is not the 
only one. 

A second misconception (responsible in part for the preceding) 
is due to thinking that children have no capacity for reflection upon 
ethical problems before their late adolescence. Professor Palmer 
says : " The college, not the school, is the place for this study. 
Many of the evils that I have thus far traced are brought 
about by projecting upon a young mind problems which it has not 
yet encountered in itself. Such problems abound in the latter 
teens and twenties, and then is the time to set about their dis- 
cussion." Evidently it is assumed that ethics-teaching in the 
schools is to be an attempt to reconcile conflicting sanctions. " Has 
he accepted the moral code inherited from honored parents? Then 
let him be thankful and go his way untaught. But has he, on the 
other hand, felt that the moral mechanism by which he was early 
guided does not fit all cases? Has he found one class of duties in 
conflict with another? Has he discovered that the moral stand- 
ards obtaining in different sections of society, in different parts 
of the world, are irreconcilable? In short, is he puzzled and de- 
sirous of working his way through his puzzles, of facing them and 
tracking them to their beginnings ? Then is he ripe for the study of 
ethics." This study is further declared to be analogous to " phil- 
ology, grammar, rhetoric, systematic study of the laws of lan- 
guage " ; " it should be pursued as a science, critically, and the stu- 



SOME MISCONCEPTIONS OF MORAL EDUCATION 35 

dent should be informed at the outset that the aim of the course 
is knowledge, not the endeavor to make better men." ^ 

If it were proposed to defend such a study of ethical science 
in the schools, the objection here cited would be unanswerable. 
But moral instruction is not at all synonymous with the teaching of 
ethics as a science. To see what the difference is, let us look at 
other fields of study in the elementary schools where the same mis- 
conception obtains. Teachers of " nature-study," for example, have 
to be warned that they are not to teach the science of biology or 
the science of physics. A science is an attempt to explain the 
whole ground of known phenomena by relating these to certain 
great generalizations, such as the atomic theory, or the evolutionary 
hypothesis, or the law of conservation of energy. An organiza- 
tion of this sort represents the needs of the adult scientist. It does 
not correspond to the needs of children. For them there need be 
no more than " a study of the facts of botany, zoology, physics, 
chemistry, geology, that affect our daily life." They are inter- 
ested, that is, in what makes the electric bell ring, without dis- 
cussing the nature of the electric current. " Nature-study, then, 
stands for educational organization based on direct human interest 
in nature. Science stands for scientific organization based on di- 
rect interest in organized knowledge for its own sake. 
Thus ... it does not seem possible that anyone with experi- 
ence in schools will dispute the statement that nature-study minus 
the scientific organization adapted to mature minds, is the proper 
work for elementartf schools." ^ The same point of view is held 
by experienced teachers in regard to other subjects. They teach 
hygiene effectively without going into histology or comparative 
morphology, music without treating the mathematical basis of har- 
mony, grammar and composition without giving a college course 
in philology or rhetoric. They teach laws and rules, to be sure, — 
not, however, because their pupils are interested in generalizations 
as such, but because, and in so far as, these principles help to ex- 
plain the concrete things of greatest interest. 

This selection and organization with reference to the needs 
of the immature pupil rather than the demands of a perfected 
science is the guiding principle in moral instruction. The main 
business of the school is to get the children to perform concrete 

2 Op. cit., pp. 46, 47, 41. 

3 M. Bigelow, " The Relation of Nature-Study and Science Teaching," 
Nature-Study Review, Vol. 4, p. 48. 



36 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

acts of right conduct. They must be taught to respect property, 
for example, without entering into the question whether the ulti- 
mate sanction for this duty is the absolute ought or their own in- 
terest. The aim of moral instruction below the college years is 
not, as Professor Palmer thinks, a " study of puzzles," but an at- 
tempt to teach the truths behind familiar experiences in terms that 
our pupils can comprehend at their present stage of development. 

This distinction ought also to answer the objection that young 
people have no interest in ethical discussion. Undoubtedly they 
will sit serenely indifferent if we try to expound a whole science 
of ethics; and we cannot blame them, because they are not inter- 
ested in generalizations as such. Hear them, however, debating 
whether it is fair to let a newcomer in the ball-team displace a 
tried pitcher, or whether they ought to expel a member who is said 
to have slandered their club. Their interest now is most intense, 
because here, to be sure, they have immediate problems to solve. 
From this point of departure, however, a good teacher can lead 
them to deeper and wider reflection, to a clearer understanding, for 
example, of the moral principles behind some of our social institu- 
tions. Or, when, to illustrate further, he makes them see why it 
is that their games of dice are forbidden or why they themselves 
disapprove of lying, he prepares the ground for a much-needed 
insight into the meaning of the laws against gambling and the 
reason for the world's insistence upon truth-telling. Moral in- 
struction takes it for granted that children normally do a certain 
amount of thinking; it seeks only to get them to give more think- 
ing to the moral issues involved than they ordinarily give, to think 
more soundly, and as they grow wiser, to make their thoughts 
gradually include more remote considerations. 

In certain circles, the two objections which we have here criti- 
cized are linked with the conviction that moral instruction is value- 
less except as it finds a conscious sanction in religion. Is not this, 
however, closely akin to the preceding misconception that we cannot 
offer wise counsel to young folks without teaching ethical phi- 
losophy.'' The answer is given by experience: our schools are not 
obliged to tread uopn this debatable ground. When school prin- 
cipals, for example, give a series of talks on the right use of school- 
property, or on the value of cooperation, do they feel obliged to 
go into the philosophic or religious sanctions, and say that their 
words are true because they rest upon this or that article of a 



SOME MISCONCEPTIONS OF MORAL EDUCATION 37 

creed, or text in the Bible ? They know that they cannot enter into 
religious discussion because the schools are supported by a popu- 
lation of widely divergent beliefs, so much at variance that it is 
impossible to teach a doctrine which will not give offense in some 
particular to some one body or other. The City Superintendent of 
Schools in New York tried to get a body of the clergy of different 
denominations to draw up a code of moral instruction for the public 
schools of his community. The conference came to naught. In 
his report on the matter. Dr. Maxwell voiced the conclusion which 
has presented itself to many other students of the problem else- 
where : " In view of this fact . . . that an agreement as to 
ethical instruction has not been, and probably will not be, reached 
among the clergy, ... I here express my conviction that edu- 
cators should take up the sub j ect, even without the aid of the clergy, 
and formulate large rules of conduct which may be illustrated by 
innumerable particular instances, and which are so well founded in 
the usages of civilized communities, and so well attested in the 
lives of noble men and women, that no one will be bold enough to 
gainsay their validity." * The words which we have italicized strike 
bottom as far as public education is concerned: there is an unde- 
niable moral heritage into which all right-minded people alike, no 
matter what their religion, wish their children to enter; and into 
this common heritage our public schools can and ought to lead. 

The unwillingness of the schools to provoke the religious ques- 
tion does not therefore leave them helpless before their great task 
of moral guidance. Religious teaching they must perforce leave 
to other agencies; moral education they may and can give, and ef- 
fectively, too. Deficient as our public system in too many cases 
has been, it is also true that its best teachers have done much to 
quicken their pupils' lives into good without raising the issue of 
the ultimate religious sanctions. Convinced by experiences like 
these, the advocates of moral instruction are simply pleading for 
more of this better practice. They are encouraged by the further 
fact that the question of ultimate sanctions is rarely brought up by 
the children themselves. It is only the mature mind which insists 
upon a metaphysical answer to its inquiries; young people are quite 
content with secondary explanations, 

A fourth misconception is the notion that moral instruction 
consists chiefly of a preaching of bald generalities. A school prin- 

4 Report of the City Superintendent of Schools, for the year 1908. 



38 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

cipal, addressing an audience of teachers, declared that he saw no 
opportunity to point a moral, for instance, in a lesson on the Span- 
ish conquest of Mexico. " Cortez was not punished for his in- 
human treatment of the Indians," he said; " and we do not know 
whether he was punished in the hereafter." If the drawing of a 
moral from a punishment were all there is to ethical values in the 
teaching of history, one might well be glad to see all attem^pts at 
such an aim ruthlessly forbidden. A moral value, however, might 
be realized in the lesson on Cortez, if the pupils were simply made 
to hate the cruelty of which his conduct was a type. There would 
be a sound " application of an idea to life," — and, therefore, ac- 
cording to Matthew Arnold, a moral idea, — if the lesson made clear 
the wider truth that people often use their superior powers to do 
harm to those who are weaker. The best treatment, however, would 
leave the young people conscious of a nobler way of using such 
gifts and would inspire them with a love for such exemplars of this 
better way as the Puritan Apostle Eliot, for instance, who em- 
ployed his talents to make life better for the Indians, not worse. 
This is something quite different from using (and often distorting) 
facts of history to prove that good is rewarded and evil punished. 
Moral education would be richly justified if it did no more than to 
realize Plato's lofty ideal of a " training in respect to virtue which 
makes one hate what he ought to hate and love what he ought to 
love." 

It also follows from this conception that moral education is 
not meant simply for delinquents or for the children of the poor 
whom we are so prone to regard as needing more of such schooling 
than the boys and girls of " respectable " homes. None of our 
young people, whatever their parentage, are so perfect that there 
is no need of suggesting higher standards than their present ones 
or better effort to reach those already accepted. To be sure, the 
ideals which we hold up will fail to possess vital meaning unless 
they go with a genuine desire to realize them; but this is no reason 
for never calling attention to them. Moral instruction might be 
compared to an attempt to increase our young people's circle of 
acquaintances in the hope that thus they will be more likely to find 
the friends whom they really want to cultivate. It is not by any 
means the poor or the criminal classes alone who need such an op- 
portunity. 

Here we may consider the objection that a constant offering 



SOME MISCONCEPTIONS OF MORAL EDUCATION 39 

of ideal characters to admire, and a constant calling for judgments 
on acts of conduct do harm by making children priggish. The best 
excellence, it is declared with truth, is that which grows uncon- 
sciously. Nevertheless, it is evidently forgotten that a perfectly un- 
conscious growth is a goal which for the great majority of us, can 
never be reached. There would never be any need of a word of warn- 
ing or of a reminder that there are better ways of behavior than our 
customary ones, if we really grew without knowing it into the best 
habits of those who are better than we, — but unfortunately we do 
not. Somewhere, at some time, conduct must receive a certain de- 
gree of very conscious attention. It is indeed true that this atten- 
tion may bring with it a sense of moral self-satisfaction, if not of 
superiority; but this possibility need not always be actualized. 
Even if it were not a fact that comrades and relatives are only too 
ready to shake out whatever moral conceit happens to be generated, 
there is little danger of its being fostered to any alarming extent 
when the teacher goes about his task properly, with due tact and a 
saving sense of humor. For one thing, he can teach his pupils to 
respect different moral views from their own, — as every good 
teacher of history and geography tries to do. He can also remind 
them of how easy duty is for those who have not been tempted so 
hard as others. Where he is sure that priggishness has set in, he 
can readily find occasions to prove that there are still greater heights 
of moral endeavor to be climbed. The method, in short, is similar 
in many respects to that which is employed to prevent or overcome 
conceit about skill in dravring or composition or athletics. The 
possibility of spiritual pride is real and serious, but it ought not 
to frighten us into letting things alone, when conditions call as 
loudly for moral betterment as they do in our country to-day. 

Another misconception is due to a popular but nevertheless 
fallacious theory of character. The conscious effort of the school 
to instil high principles of conduct is called an idle dream on the 
ground that a loftier morality cannot be inculcated there than is 
practiced in the life outside — that is, the attempt to make school 
pupils honest is doomed to failure until there is more integrity, let 
us say, in the world of business. This idea is based on a funda- 
mental misunderstanding of human nature, namely, that character 
is something which is inhaled like a physical atmosphere. Char- 
acter, however, is not an affair of purely passive reaction to en- 
vironing influences. It is a matter of strength that comes from 



40 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

victory over obstacles. These obstacles are certain tendencies in 
our own make-up which prompt to evil doing. Wrong exists in the 
environment, but only because human beings commit it. The same 
traits that incline people to do the bad in the outer world, such as 
the love of gain or the love of ease, or vanity, are found in the 
nature of young folks in the school. These germs must be de- 
stroyed, to be sure, in the life outside; the efforts of the school 
must indeed be backed up by the unceasing efforts of the rest of 
the community to drive out its worst and encourage its noblest; but 
since the germs of evil are lodged also in the individual within the 
fold, here, too, the bad must be made over into the good. The 
social-determination view of human improvement is as onesided as 
the old idea of the complete spontaneity of the moral nature. 

Moreover, the environment outside is not composed exclusively 
of the morally inferior. There are indeed shopkeepers who cheat; 
but there are also those who give honest weight and make true 
statements about their wares. In every occupation there are high 
grades of moral development which are no whit less real than the 
low. Why, then, may not the imitation which plays so strong a 
part in character-building be directed to these better examples? 
Furthermore, if the social-determination argument is sound, why 
should the schools hold up any standards at all which are higher 
than those already extant in the environment? In courtesy, iu 
neatness, in purity of speech, the tone of the school is better than 
that of life in many homes, and certainly higher than the tone of 
the street. Children are ashamed of ridicule from their comrades 
when they pronounce the " u " properly in " student " and the 
" h " in " when " ; yet the school would call itself recreant to its 
trust if it did not at least make the attempt to supply correct 
standards of speech. If there is no desire for better things, what 
better place is there to try to create it than the school, and what 
better time than the years when the worthier influences are still 
possible? If this is true of a secondary value like good English, 
how far more urgent is the need in the case of the primary com- 
mandments of the moral law ! 

The objections which we have here considered serve a very 
useful purpose. They warn us of no imaginary dangers. Perhaps 
the greatest mistake of all is our nation-wide tendency to put our 
trust in isolated devices and quick remedies. We forget too often 
that character is a matter of the slowest growth and of the most 



THE MORAL EDUCATION OF CHILDREN 41 

complex interplay of forces. With an all too easy optimism, we 
are inclined to fancy that just as the teaching of spelling in the 
school years is expected to insure a permanent excellence in spelling, 
so moral training, or else the inspiration of good examples in history 
and literature, or set lessons upon the various duties, — in short, 
some single happy device, will make for a permanent bettering of 
the national character. How idle is this hope! No ethical in- 
struction alone will see to it that every legislator of the future 
spurns a proffered bribe or that " big business " scorns to offer it. 
The task of social regeneration is far too vast to be left entirely to 
the schoolhouse. In like manner, the share in this task which can 
properly be demanded of the school is too complex to be entrusted 
to any single one of the agencies there. Moral instruction which 
does not touch the deeper springs of conduct becomes a fruitless 
and often harmful intellectual exercise. Moral emotion which finds 
no opportunity to express itself in the concrete experiences of the 
daily life, loses itself in sentimental vapor. Moral training, in- 
dispensable as it is, has no vital meaning to the children unless it 
calls to its aid the enlightenment of the judgment and the stirring 
of the proper disposition. The problem of the school, in a word, 
is the question not of any one agency, but of three so closely in- 
terrelated that none of them can do its allotted work without the 
other two. Instruction, inspiration, training, are necessary, all 
three. It is in this triply inclusive sense that the term "moral 
education " should be employed. 

THE MORAL EDUCATION OF CHILDREN. 
Frank A. Manny. 

DIRECTOR OF THE TRAINING OF TEACHERS, BALTIMORE, MARYLAND. 

One of our popular magazines published some years ago the 
results of a questionary which had been sent out to determine the 
attitude of boys of high school age toward graft. The result 
showed a high moral tone among the boys and a readiness to con- 
demn various instances of wrong-doing on the part of public offi- 
cials. I suggested at the time that another inquiry was needed 
which would show actual conditions in the school societies in which 
these boys are at work. Their reactions to the opportunities that 
arise in high school politics, the management of athletics and the 



42 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

securing of advertisements for school papers are of more signifi- 
cance as indications of what they will do in public life than are 
their opinions upon the acts of their elders. 

When the Idea came to be recognized as a tool in progress, it 
is not strange that it was supposed to have been innate. Popular 
philosophy and practice has scarcely gone beyond that stage even 
to-day. The movement from the time of Locke on has been a 
steady advance, but no step in that movement was of greater as- 
sistance than that which marked the recognition of the tendencies 
called instincts and impulses as the first things in consciousness 
rather than those more complicated functions-ideas. 

One of the first results of this change of thought was to use it 
as a new authority for the denial of higher mental processes to 
children. Adult provincialism tends to consider the stages of 
thinking it has attained to as different in kind from those of the 
child and consequently reaches the conclusion that child conscious- 
ness is merely a matter of perception, memory and habit. Moral 
education need not fear, however, that the higher processes of in- 
telligence are absent. 

The fact is that the child at his various stages of growth has 
not only his own ways of perceiving and remembering, but also 
his ways of judging and reasoning. His growth as a moral per- 
sonality depends on the habits he forms; but it makes little prog- 
ress unless it is served by whatever degrees of choice and selec- 
tion he has reached in his ability to use ideas and ideals. How 
shall we help him here ? Dr. J. K. Hart says in " A Critical 
Study of Current Theories of Moral Education " (University of 
Chicago Press) : " The powers of self have to be developed through 
the development of a world calling for those powers. The self 
reflects the world that it lives in, i. e., that has risen into con- 
sciousness with it. Education has accordingly, the problem of pro- 
viding for such creative situations in the developing experience as 
shall insure the rise of the larger self, and the more inclusive 
world. The function of education in a progressive nation is not 
merely to develop habits suited to a present condition of life, but 
also to develop adaptability that will enable the individual to fit 
himself to new conditions as they appear. But adaptability is a 
function, not of habit or instinct, but of attention, of intelligence, 
of consciousness." It is then a second advantage that we are able 
to state the problem of moral education in terms of participation 



THE MORAL EDUCATION OF CHILDREN 43 

in responsibility for the changing of environment as well as of 
adaptation to a changing environment 

The need for the child therefore is a curriculum of activities 
whose meanings he will organize into a unified and comprehensive 
self utilizing his native tendencies as social possibilities. Educa- 
tion is a cooperative growth in experience affording to the indi- 
vidual resources of self, society and nature and enabling him to 
participate in the progress brought about by the interaction of 
these factors. 

In the selection of these activities there should be included: 
(1) some undertakings involving raw materials very near to the 
conditions in which nature produces them, (2) many experiments 
in which the worker learns to enter into the labor of others and 
uses as material that which is the result of what other persons 
have put into it, (3) still other projects in which he must take 
account of the present labor of other workers with whom he must 
learn to cooperate economically and effectively, (4) contact with 
the products of other processes in industry and art. These 
products make up a great part of our culture background. The 
worker must be able to deal with these at first hand — whether in 
the form of books, paintings, sculpture, architecture, machinery, 
formulas, creeds or other organizations of human experience. 
While he has reverence for these as culture products of the past, 
they also exist as a part of the problem upon which he is at work 
and suggest to him means of reenforcing what he is doing. 

Our conception of vocational training must be more thorough. 
It must not be interpreted too narrowly, with reference, that 
is, to preparation for only the vocations of adult life. We have 
too little knowledge of what it means to be ten-twelve-sixteen years 
of age. Each period of life is a highly specialized vocation in 
itself. To live fully any one of these periods is the surest promise 
of successful entrance upon the next. Idiocy, imbecility and even 
feeble-mindedness have become fairly clearly defined problems to 
us; but only in recent child-labor legislation and various social 
organizations have we shown that we recognize the positive aspects 
of life during the period which in a state of arrest we call the 
moron. Our social conditions seem to have been adjusted for the 
purpose of holding certain classes of men in that period for life 
instead of recognizing their increased value when aided to enter 
into the larger view and greater skill of later periods. 



44 SECOND INTEENATIONAL MORAL, EDUCATION CONGRESS 

The gr«at change in education as we come down to modern 
times is the extent to which experiences require conscious atten- 
tion and training which in earlier days came more as matters of 
habit. In all historic times, the leaders of men have had a large 
amount of conscious redirection in their mental lives between 
instincts, impulses and impressions on the one hand and habit, 
judgment or reason and expression or communication on the other. 
The modern problem is complicated by increasing emphasis on all 
these factors for all the people and not, as in an oligarchical or 
monarchical society, for only the few. Democracy gives to all 
some share in control, which means that all need training for con- 
scious reflection. This is the essence of secondary education and 
it brings about revolutionary changes not only in the period of 
adolescence, but also in the earlier years of life. Formal ethical 
instruction has attempted to meet this secondary requirement, but 
too often has done it in the more limited way, that is, by appeals 
from without, instead of aiding the child to meet his own ex- 
periences with the best powers he already has and so grow to better 
control. Habit should be left to look after what can best be 
controlled by that means; but care must be taken not to carry over 
the rigidity of habit into matters where reason should guide. 
■Mere activity alone, like mere emotion alone, or mere thinking, 
means a narrow life. 

Individuality must be respected. See how easily we ignore 
it in physical education. Exercise has been defined as " An at- 
tempt to get back some of these conditions under which the body 
developed its functions." Yet there is usually as much orthodoxy 
among schoolmen about games as there has been about religion. 
Baseball and football are forced by public opinion upon boys whose 
exercise and school-spirit needs could be met much better in other 
ways. Too little attention is paid to the possibilities of the in- 
dividual. Lacking assistance or opportunity in what he can do 
well and failing to accomplish anything worth while in the ortho- 
dox avenues, he joins the crowd on the bleachers and looks on 
while others perform. His activity is spent in yells which are too 
often encouraged by appeals to party spirit or other narrow in- 
terests which he could easily transcend under normal conditions. 
Courage, school-spirit, exercise and sociability are virtues we wish 
to find in all lives; but are the means we use to encourage them 
those which will most certainly insure their development.'' 



THE MORAL EDUCATION OF CHILDREN 45 

Dr. Jones of Toronto in the Journal of Educational Psychol' 
ogy, May, 1912, in a discussion of psycho-analysis and education, 
says : " Our present system of forcing all children except those 
obviously defective through the same intellectual mill is probably 
productive of much less harm than our even stricter custom of 
exacting under fearful penalties, a uniform moral, social, and 
ethical standard of behavior. In all these respects there should 
be a greater regard for the individual constitution and individual 
tendency, a more lenient tolerance combined with a more prescient 
knowledge. In every branch of education there is need of a 
looser rein, but also of a more clear-sighted guidance. This would 
give us, it is true, a greater variety in the social commonwealth 
not unwelcome to those who are depressed at the monotonousness 
of modern life, but also a more accurate fitting of the individual 
to the tasks he has to fulfill, and a much greater development of 
individual capacity and efficiency." 

It sometimes seems that we have little faith in what the race 
has worked out in habit and intelligence when we fear that it only 
needs opportunity and freedom from eternal control to plunge man- 
kind into dissipation. Discussions of sex hygiene at times have 
steered clear of honest investigation into the reported successful 
treatment of venereal diseases in the British Navy and into the 
effect produced upon marriage and the birth rate by discoveries of 
ways to control conception, as if it were certain that only the belief 
in hell was responsible for the moral character mankind has 
achieved. 

With all the increase of resource which modern psychology of- 
fers, we have still, however, the problem of organizing our relations 
to young people and their opportunities for getting at what the 
race has formulated. The French lycee year in philosophy is a 
suggestive field of study here in planning moral education. There 
is little defense for bringing a boy of seventeen or eighteen into 
half a dozen sections of adult philosophy in the course of a school 
year, but there is much to be said in favor of better facilities for 
assisting him to interpret his own experiences in the light of what 
others have said and done. We cannot keep some form of psychol- 
ogy, ethics and other divisions of philosophy out of the secondary 
school; but we can determine whether the forms in which they ap- 
pear are really serviceable or not. 

We can decry direct and conscious instruction. Most of what 



46 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MOBAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

we see done is very imperfect and often it is objectionable. The 
strongest argument, based on the effect of several years of direct 
instruction which I had opportunity to observe, is that the children 
who had this training seemed to approach a moral issue or the dis- 
cussion of one with more real humility than did those members of 
their classes who had been trained in more usual ways. Whatever 
the present state of this instruction and its effects, however, the 
movement in education seems to show that this ideal element will 
play a large part at various ages but that we shall be relatively 
helpless in the matter until the ideal factor grows out of and relates 
to real responsible experience. 



THE DUTY OF THE SCHOOL TO EDUCATE FOR 
THE RIGHT USE OF LEISURE. 

Percival Chubb. 

Schiller's well-known theory that man is man only when he 
plays implies that play reveals character as work does not. The 
reason is sufficiently obvious. Man works as he must; he plays as 
he likes. Work compels and constrains; play is free self-expres- 
sion, self-determined activity. This explains why, if we would 
know the genius of a people, we must see how they behave when 
they are doing what they like. To understand a person, catch him 
at his play. 

In the case of most adults, though unfortunately not all of 
them, leisure is about one-half of life. In the case of chil- 
dren, it is a good deal more than one-half. Is it not therefore 
worth while to take this greater half of human life into account 
in our education? If education is a preparation for life, and if 
life is one-half leisure, then logically one-half of education should 
be concerned with preparation for leisure. 

This proposition sounds absurd enough, to be sure, in these 
days when the whole tendency in education is towards the utili- 
tarian and practical. Nevertheless, I ask your serious considera- 
tion for the proposal; and I begin by affirming that never, I sup- 
pose, in the history of the race has it been so important to provide 
for the profitable use of leisure as it is to-day. And this is for 
two reasons, first, the demoralizing thraldom of work, and second. 



EDUCATION FOB RIGHT USE OF LEISURE 47 

the ethical bankruptcy of work, — by which I mean the failure of 
work to subserve the larger ends of character-development. 

Consider the first point, — the thraldom of work. We are de- 
bauching hundreds of thousands of our toilers by an inhuman, ex- 
hausting day of work which leaves them incapable of using their 
short leisure to any profitable humanizing purpose. We need not 
cite extreme instances like the wicked employment of a large per- 
centage of employees in the Steel Works for twelve hours a day 
and seven days in the week, facts certified to us by recent statisti- 
cal returns. Even the average worker, who is away from his home 
from ten to twelve hours a day, is generally too tired to engage in 
leisure activities that are profitable. A mill owner was asked as 
he showed to a visitor the dwellings of his operatives, " Is this 
where your workmen live?" "No," came the answer, "this is 
where they sleep; they live in my works." 

We have even been guilty of something like a similar over- 
emphasis of the work idea in our education. Too many schools are 
still the homes of child labor, of a deadening, stupefying character. 
The labor demanded of the child is too prolonged. He cannot be 
a real child in school. It is a fact in consequence, that much of 
what our young scholars are taught does not stick, does not make 
character. This is due partly (I will not be sweeping here) to the 
reason that there is a hurried and crude grind which actually dam- 
ages mentality and creates a disgust with school life so strong that 
often it is not so much the parents as the children themselves who 
are anxious for school days to be ended and work time to begin. 
I would by no means visit blame for this condition entirely or indeed 
chiefly upon the school; the home and the social environment must 
indeed share that blame; but the school cannot escape a certain 
measure of condemnation. It does not do enough to encourage 
interest in its work. There is not enough play in it, not enough 
relation to the leisure concerns of living. It is not itself a form 
of genuine life to be woven with other texture into the web of life 
as a whole. With the very little child, work is altogether play. 
He learns by doing, by delighted doing, and he ought to continue 
to learn as he grows older, to some extent at least, in the same 
way. But after the kindergarten, we begin to alter all that and 
run to the other extreme — work, and work which is excessive both 
as to the time spent at the desk in the school and at the desk in 
the home when school is dismissed. Our one-sided attention to 



48 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MOEAI, EDUCATION CONGRESS 

work in school for the purpose of preparing for work outside has in- 
volved a failure to develop an aptitude for sound use of leisure in 
spite of the fact that this capacity for profitable leisure is the su- 
preme means whereby manhood and womanhood are to be enriched 
and developed throughout life. 

The second reason why provision for the right use of leisure 
is more important to-day than it has ever been in the history of 
the race lies in the ethical bankruptcy of work. This fact is at 
once apparent to us when we reflect upon the nature and the 
processes of work in our great factories. What salvation through 
work is possible for the man engaged day in and day out, year 
in and year out, in making the twentieth part of a shoe? Such 
work is not only deadening, but is so injurious that it is driving 
men and women over all the country into the hospitals and insane 
asylums. I make this statement on the authority of an expert 
on this question. Dean Schneider, of Cincinnati, who has been en- 
deavoring to find and suggest ways whereby workers may be saved 
from the horrible consequences of monotonous, mechanical toil. 
What the situation means was brought home to me in another form 
by a social worker of this city a week or two ago, when she in- 
formed me that the head of a great factory had objected to the 
distribution of suffragette literature to the factory women during 
the dinner hour because it would impair their routine efficiency at 
their deadly work during the afternoon. 

It is no longer possible, then, to place the old hope in the 
great " Gospel of Work " thundered forth by Thomas Carlyle. 
Work for the increasing masses of our factory workers is an Eden- 
like curse upon men. Veritably, in the sweat of the brow, by the 
sacrifice of the nobler part of them, must they earn their daily 
bread. The attitude taken by the average worker (and by no 
means in the lowest ranges of machine industry, but as it happens, 
even in such higher forms as printing) was brought home to me in 
an endeavor once made in New York to institute a beautiful popular 
pageant or festival for Labor Day. The labor leaders present at 
the conference would have none of it. They protested that their 
one desire was to get away from their work and forget it. 

The conclusion which is inevitably borne in upon us is that 
since so many men and women cannot be saved through their work, 
they must be saved through their play, their recreation, their leisure 
interests and activities. What a pity, then, that the old arts of 



EDUCATION FOR RIGHT USE OF LEISURE 49 

leisure are failing us at a time when we need them most ! By these 
arts I mean the old folk arts, folk dances, folk songs, folk story, 
folk balladry, folk drama, folk festival. All these were popular, 
democratic arts, not forms of diversion supplied for the people 
but hy them. They were expressions by the people themselves 
of their collective life, their manifold arts and crafts, and folk 
heritage from the past. Fortunately, I need not speak from hear- 
say. I recall many an exhibition of such folk arts in the England of 
my boyhood. I recall vividly the concentrated expression of them in 
the fragrant May Day pageant with its groups of lasses and lads as 
they filed through the streets of town and village on their way 
to the green where the May Pole awaited them, — the Queen of the 
May, her attendants and body guard; the Sherwood foresters, led 
by Robin Hood, Maid Marion, Little John, and their gallant com- 
rades, with many other groups, shepherds and shepherdesses, fisher- 
men and fishwives following in their train. What have we to-day 
as a substitute for this charming gayety on any of our national 
holidays.^ Let our bored groups of loafers and hoodlums, our 
crowded saloons, our vaudeville shows and moving picture exhibits, 
our silly, vulgar drama make answer. The people are the passive 
recipients of entertainment, no longer active participants, no longer 
capable therefore of filling their leisure hours with any activity 
which involves their own self-development. 

These are facts which educators cannot afford to ignore. Our 
schooling must be brought into line with the situation. If leisure, 
wholesome recreation is so important, the school must prepare for 
it. The home must likewise prepare for it. We must bring back 
into life the games which made children's parties such a delight 
in olden times, — the puppet shows, charades, minstrel shows, 
circuses in which boys used to delight. All this must be brought 
back under the leadership of the school and the supervised play- 
ground. There must be a much more vital interest and much richer 
equipment in song and in music, in declamation and dramatics, so 
that results in these fields may be carried over into life. Happily, 
in the schools, there is a tendency in the right direction manifest- 
ing itself through the introduction of systematic play, instruction 
in play, the direction and supervision of play in some schools 
through dramatic activities, and (more important still) through 
the Playground Associations which are springing up throughout 
the country. Furthermore, popular festivals have been greatly on 



50 SECOND INTERNATIONAL, MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

the increase, and in the schools themselves the wise philosophy of 
Froebel has been spreading slowly from the kindergarten into the 
primary grades. 

It is impossible now to indicate the ways and means toward 
these results, and I must assert, dogmatically perhaps, on the basis 
of exprience and effort in the Ethical Culture School in New York, 
that such results can be accomplished and have been accomplished. 
In that school, the efforts to train for leisure were focused in a 
Department of Festivals through which literature, music, art, do- 
mestic art and dancing found their practical coordination and were 
kept alive for use in the festival-entertainment given many times 
in the course of the year. The culture so gained was carried over 
into life. 

It may seem to be the very perversity of ingenuity which 
would add one jot or tittle to our school burdens in these days of 
overcrowded and often fad-ridden curricula. But although the 
festival may involve new labors, it does not add a new subject to 
the school program. It should fill the place and serve the purpose 
of the popular festival in coordinating and vitalizing activities al- 
ready engaged in. This has been its chief value in the artistic 
and imaginative development of the race. The great popular fes- 
tival of the past has been a means of coordinating for the purpose 
of one great, ceremonial celebration, the work of the artist and 
artisan, the actor, the dancer, and the singer, so as to produce an 
organic and massive unity of effect. By following this clue, we 
obtain a very genuine and natural correlation of school subjects 
and activities in place of the very forced and artificial correlation 
which is often sought after in our schools. 

So regarded and dealt with, the school festival, instead of in- 
volving disturbance of the school work, becomes an actual aid 
by imparting to it reality, meaning and coherence. But this de- 
mands careful organization and planning, on the part of the school. 
For years the Ethical Culture School has been working at this 
problem; and its methods and results may be briefly set forth. 

At the close of each school year it is decided what festivals are 
to be celebrated during the coming year; and each one of these is 
apportioned to a grade or grades according to possibilities of 
utilizing some part of their regular work in English, History, Art, 
Mtisic, Physical Culture, manual work — in fact, almost every sub- 
ject studied. Occasionally, some modification of the work is called 



EDUCATION FOR RIGHT USE OF LEISURE 51 

for^ but as a rule, the festival adapts itself to the work rather 
than the converse. For there is no settled type of festival. 
Rather is variety sought for. The festival — say, Patriots' Day — 
that is in charge one year of the Seventh grade studying the Revo- 
lutionary period of American history, may next year be intrusted 
to the Sixth, studying the contest for supremacy between the 
English and the French; '^ Christmas or May Day may be cele- 
brated, now by the Fourth grade, now by the Tenth. In one fes- 
tival the tableau will predominate; in another, the story element; 
in another, the dramatic or the lyric. Sometimes the " book " is 
written entirely by the children; sometimes the material or the 
plan — say of an olden-time May Day or Harvest Home celebra- 
tion — is supplied ; sometimes a classic play or masque — Shake- 
speare's " As You Like It," or " Midsummer Night's Dream, or 
Milton's " Comus," or an adaptation from " Hiawatha " or " Christ- 
mas Carol " or a miscellany of " Mother Goose " dramatizations 
by the youngest, will serve. The type is determined by a careful 
regard to the peculiar aptitudes or the pressing needs of the grades, 
a festival being occasionally assigned to a grade because it needs 
the special training and discipline which a selected piece of work 
will ajfiord. And let it be added here that, more valuable often 
than any other result achieved, is the discipline in manners, in 

1 Such was the case this year, as the following program shows: THE 
ETHICAL CULTURE SCHOOL. PATRIOTS' DAY FESTIVAL: Fri- 
day, February 19, 1904, 9 o'clock A. M. — The festival is in charge of the 
Sixth grade and has been developed as a part of the work in English and 
history. The leading idea of the historical work is the meaning of the 
contest between New England and New France for supremacy in the New 
World; and the festival has served to bring to light the growth from the 
restricted patriotism of the English and French pioneer to the larger 
American patriotism which has joined together the peoples of aU nations 
in the bonds of freedom and hmnanity. (1) "The Indian in the American 
Wilderness;" scene near an Iroquois camp: the sachem tells the story of 
the origin of the Iroquois Turtle Clan. (2) " The English in New 
Englana," illustrating the love of home and the love of mother-country; 
song, old English Ditty; scene, a Settler's clearing. (3) " The French in 
New France," in the service of France and the church; scene 1, the top of 
a ridge between two rivers; Champlain takes possession of New France; 
song, "Gregorian Chant," Ninety-fifth Psalm; scene 2, an opening in the 
forest: the Jesuits on the way to Quebec to make their reports; scene 3, 
near a river; the voyageurs carry their furs to the trading post; songs (a) 
"Canadian Paddling Song;" (b) "Petit Jean;" (c) "V'la I'bon Vent;" 
scene 4, clearing near a fort: after a battle; the French surrender to the 
English; the prophecy of future union. (4) "The American of To-day;" 
scene, outside the St. Louis Exposition on the eve of completion; the 
prophecy fulfilled. Interspersed between the scenes will be patriotic songs 
by the entire school. 



52 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

courtesy, in considerateness, and in the recognition of worth, which 
the " team-work " of the preparation calls for.^ 

To conclude, education fails of its first purpose if it does not 
create a liking for worthy and beautiful things, does not generate 
life-long interest in the formative arts of civilization. Mere knowl- 
edge is of quite secondary importance; in fact the assiduous one- 
sided endeavor to accumulate knowledge often crushes out forever 
an initial interest in those things which truly promote culture. 

It is, in the second place, the function of the school to stand- 
ardize the taste in the field of the arts. It must make of its 
graduates cultivated patrons of the arts, all the art of the home, 
the popular arts of song and drama, the literary arts, the fine 
arts. In this endeavor, the school has a grim conflict to wage with 
the deteriorating forces of the social environment. In its effort to 
generate a love of beautiful song, it finds itself at war with ragtime 
songs and street ditties ; in its endeavor to lift its pupils' taste to 
the level of Shakespearian drama, it finds itself at war with the 
vaudeville show, the moving picture show, and the low-class plays 
which are presented at our theaters. 

Most important of all, the school must, in the third place, de- 
velop not only tastes and make the right kind of patronage pos- 
sible, it must develop the aptitudes and elementary skill which 
shall make participation in helpful leisure activities possible. Our 
boys and girls must not only be taught to sing, but be stocked with a 
generous supply of songs which they will sing. Their leisure life 
must overflow with song, and lead to the establishment everywhere 
of Choral Clubs, and Musical Societies. The school must develop, 
as it ought to do in connection with the study of drama, the power 
of dramatic interpretation, which, in its turn, should lead to the 
multiplication of dramatic clubs. Similarly, there should be, as the 
outcome of school education, literary clubs, debating clubs, story 
clubs, art clubs, philosophy clubs, political and social ethics clubs 
in great plenty all over our towns and cities. 

I must bring this brief outline of a great topic to a close by 
insisting that this is the way also to the very greatest of all results 
to be achieved by education — that is, the formation of character 
by reaching the springs of character in the heart, the emotions, the 
imagination. Education, as ex-President Eliot has insisted, has 

2 From a pamphlet, " The Function of the Festival in the School-Life," 
published by the Ethical Culture School, New York. 



IMPROVED METHODS IN SUNDAY SCHOOL WORK 53 

largely disappointed those who, forty years or more ago, enter- 
tained the hope that it would speedily reform our public and private 
life. The statistics of crime and disease, corruption and deteriora- 
tion are a saddening record. This disappointing outcome is due 
to the fact that we have failed to make education serve life and 
reach the bases of character; we have over-intellectualized it; we 
have made a fetish of knowledge ; we have not met the new needs of 
a rapidly changing social life, among which needs I would place 
in the forefront the need of equipment for the right use of leisure. 
Did space permit, I would attempt to indicate the part which 
the church and the Sunday School should play in this great task. 
But the leadership must come from the public schools. If they 
take it, they will find that more of their pupils will remain with 
them, more of them will carry their education forward into new 
phases, more of them will know the profit and the joy of participat- 
ing in the great heritage of beauty which awaits their appropria- 
tion. 

IMPROVED METHODS IN SUNDAY SCHOOL WORK 
By Rabbi David Philipson, D.D., Cincinnati, Ohio. 

The Sunday school as we know it to-day may be said to be an 
American creation. True, before the American Sunday school was 
organized, the civil day of rest was devoted to purposes of reli- 
gious instruction in various European lands ; and notably in Eng- 
land was this advocated by Robert Raikes (1735-1811) who has 
been called the father of the Sunday school because of the work 
which he inaugurated. But the Sunday school movement originated 
by Raikes was somewhat different from what is understood by the 
term now. Raikes was appalled by the ignorance and frequent 
depravity of the children of the poor. Their opportunities for 
education and improvement were altogether negligible. During the 
week they were often forced to toil for a pittance. Their only free 
time was Sunday. Raikes had the inspiration that this free day 
could be put to good use for the benefit of the community by in- 
structing and improving these children. His was not a church move- 
ment. Neither was the teaching in the schools he founded confined 
to the Bible and the catechism. Elementary instruction in reading 
and writing was a feature of these schools. Though in the strictest 
sense, Raikes cannot therefore be given the credit of creating the 



54 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

Sunday school as a distinct department of church activity, as is 
generally supposed, still no one can or will dispute the fact that his 
conception of the possibilities of the rest day for purposes of child 
instruction, gave the impetus to the origin and development of the 
Sunday school as the religious educational institution of the church, 
even though at the start his plan of using Sunday for purposes of 
secular as well as religious instruction encountered the opposition 
of the churches. 

This may have been due to the fact that in England the need 
for such an institution was not so keenly felt at that time, since all 
the day schools then in existence had provisions for religious instruc- 
tion. Up to the time of the foundation of the republic the same may 
be said to have been true of the United States. Although in New 
England, pastors used the interval between the morning and after- 
noon services on Sunday for the religious instruction of children, 
still this was not a imique feature of the week's activities. Reli- 
gion bulked so large on the horizon of New England life that home 
and school life were altogether permeated with the religious spirit. 
However, with the adoption of the principle of the separation of 
Church and State and all that it implied as one of the foundation 
stones of the new republic, religious instruction was gradually 
withdrawn from the public schools, which were attended by chil- 
dren of many varying denominations, and the different churches 
were forced to make provision for the religious education of the 
children in Sunday schools. 

It cannot be my purpose here to trace the history of the Sun- 
day school movement in the United States. Sufficient to say that 
since the organization in 1791 of " The First Day or Sunday School 
Society " at Philadelphia, the Sunday school movement has grown 
to vast proportions in the United States. All Protestant and Jewish 
churches make provision for the religious instruction of their chil- 
dren and young people in Sunday schools. The Catholic church 
as a matter of course gives such instruction daily in its parochial 
schools. The various Protestant denominations have their Sunday 
school publication societies, as have also the Jews. Large portions 
of the sessions of church conventions are devoted to the discussion 
of problems of religious education. During the past decade, greater 
attention has been paid to this subject than ever before. The rec- 
ognition of the importance of the work led to the organization in 
February 1903 at Chicago of the Religious Education Association 



IMPROVED METHODS IN SUNDAY SCHOOL, M'ORK 55 

whose annual conventions in different cities of the country bring to- 
gether the leading religious educators of all Protestant denomina- 
tions for the thoughtful consideration of the various phases of 
religious education. Jewish educators have spoken at some of the 
meetings also. Leading psychologists and educational experts are 
applying the latest results of psychological and pedagogical science 
to the methods of the religious school. As a result of all this activ- 
ity^ there has been a marked advance all along the line of Sunday 
school work. It is the purpose of this paper to indicate the chief 
features of this progress. 

equipment: 

The Sunday school in its beginnings received chary treat- 
ment as far as housing accommodations were concerned. One 
large room^ either the church auditorium itself^ or a room of sim- 
ilar size in the basement was used. The various classes all met 
in this room at the same time. Sometimes temporary partitions were 
provided to separate the various classes. More frequently^ however, 
there was not even this scant provision. The impossibility of doing 
effective work, or even of keeping decent order under such conditions 
is readily apparent. The Sunday school was working with most 
ineffective means. In time the need for better accommodations was 
felt and congregations here and there began to give attention to 
the satisfying of this need. The so-called Akron plan of building 
grew very popular. This consists of a large church auditorium 
surrounded by small class rooms along the outer walls of a semi- 
circular hall on the ground floor or in the gallery. These class 
rooms are separated from the church auditorium by folding doors, 
sliding partitions or curtains. When necessity arises, all the rooms 
can be thrown into one large space. It was found in many in- 
stances that this plan, excellent as it was to meet certain needs, yet 
was far from ideal. The next step was to supply a special build- 
ing for Sunday school purposes, either altogether separate from the 
church, or attached to the church building by a connecting hall or 
corridor. This building has separate class rooms in such number 
as the needs of the school require and an auditorium for meetings 
of the entire school, of church societies and other organizations. A 
still further advance has been made by institutional churches by 
placing gymnasiums in the school building and making provisions 
for other recreational and social activities. 



56 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

It is thus a far cry from the Sunday school of the last cen- 
tury meeting with all its classes in the church auditorium, each 
teacher making herself heard as best she could (the teachers were 
usually women volunteers) above the din of the numerous classes 
assembled in the same room, to the modern Sunday school building 
supplied with all the approved educational apparatus in the way of 
light, well-ventilated rooms for all the classes, desks, maps, charts, 
blackboards, and the like. The proper physical equipment, if it 
may be so termed, was altogether necessary if the Sunday school 
was to assume a worthy place among the religious institutions of 
the country. The increasing attention being paid to this physical 
equipment by religious denominations everywhere is indicative of 
the growing appreciation of the real possibilities of the Sunday 
school as not only an adjunct of the church but as its strongest 
ally. Progress has been made, however, not only in the outer 
habiliments but what is indeed of far greater importance, the method 
of instruction has largely changed and progressed in a line with 
improvements in pedagogical methods in schools and colleges 
throughout the land. 

THE GRADED SCHOOL: 

The Sunday school of an earlier day took no account 
whatsoever of educational methods prevailing in secular schools. 
It went its own way. Its primary purpose was to impart to 
the pupils the contents of the Bible in more or less thorough 
fashion (usually less), to have them memorize Biblical verses or 
passages, and to teach them by rote the catechism of the denomi- 
national church in whose school they were being taught. The in- 
struction lasted about one hour per week on Sunday morning be- 
fore the beginning of the church service. The teaching was done 
by volunteers who, however willing to do the work, were yet quite 
unfitted and unprepared for the task. These conditions still pre- 
vail largely. After many trials and experiments, the so-called uni- 
form lesson plan was evolved and from the year eighteen hundred 
and seventy, when the publication of these lessons began, to the 
year nineteen hundred and eight, when their inadequacy was finally 
acknowledged, and the graded course of study was formally adopted 
at the convention of the International Sunday School Association 
at Louisville, Kentucky they were used almost universally in the 
Sunday schools of evangelical Protestant churches. Each week 



IMPROVED METHODS IN SUNDAY SCHOOL WORK 57 

a lesson was issued in leaflet form and this same lesson was studied 
by all the pupils of the school, whether these pupils were six or 
eighteen years of age. The entire purpose was to present a Biblical 
lesson and have it learnt in some fashion or other by each individual. 
The Sunday school in most churches as an educational institution 
was beneath consideration. The growing recognition of the fact 
that the uniform lesson plan was educationally unsound led to its 
final abandonment. Along with this recognition went the awaken- 
ing to the fact that if the Sunday school was to be really efficacious, 
it must adopt the methods of the secular school, it must grade the 
pupils according to some well-conceived plan, it must take account 
of the findings of pedagogical experts, it must apply the results of 
the new psychology, it must have trained teachers, it must present 
the material of its instructions, that is, the Bible and the lessons of 
religion and ethics, in such form as to meet the needs of each child 
year. The adolescent youth and maiden having altogether other 
interests and views from the boy and girl of ten required entirely 
diff'erent lesson material and far other instruction. Sunday schools 
in many places have therefore changed their plans completely. 

The Unitarians, Friends, Episcopalians and Jews each traveled 
their own path in the matter of Sunday school instruction and 
method. All of these churches have their own Sunday school liter- 
ature and they were not wedded to the uniform lesson plan as were 
the evangelical churches. Many synagogues have had graded 
schools for many years. But these denominations also (as is the 
case with the so-called evangelical Protestant churches) are all be- 
ing affected in their Sunday school methods by the new spirit preva- 
lent in the general educational world. 

The graded school is the expression of this new spirit in the 
educational department of the churches. It correlates the Sunday 
school to the public or private school which the children attend. 
It takes note of the growing nature of the child. By advancing the 
pupil from grade to grade in orderly sequence, the impression is 
gained that the Sunday school is on the same footing as the day 
school and requires equal attention and application. Possibly no- 
where does the Sunday school give better evidence of improvement 
in method than in this introduction of the graded system. The 
graded Sunday school, though recent in most churches, will surely 
make its way until it becomes the rule, where in the nineteenth 
century it was the exception. 



58 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

Curricula for such graded schools have been planned by reli- 
gious educators and are being followed in many schools; these cur- 
ricula vary as a matter of course in different denominations, but 
they follow more or less a similar plan. For example, according 
to one curriculum the school is divided into the kindergarten, pri- 
mary, grammar, high and adult grades ; according to another, the 
divisions are termed : kindergarten, elementary, secondary and senior 
grades. In both these curricula the kindergarten grade is for chil- 
dren to the age of six, the primary and grammar grades of the 
former curriculum corresponds to the elementary grade of the latter, 
covering the ages from six to thirteen ; the high school grades of the 
first named curriculum corresponds to the secondary of the second 
and covers the ages from fourteen to seventeen, while the adult and 
senior grades in the two curricula are co-extensive, covering the 
ages from eighteen to twenty-one. In still other curricula, the terms 
junior and senior are used in place of grammar and high in the 
first curriculum and elementary and secondary in the second. The 
whole subject of the curriculum of the graded school is still in the 
formative stage; different educators are working out details in dif- 
ferent ways, but all advanced educational Sunday school educators, 
no matter to what denomination (Protestant or Jewish) they may 
belong, are agreed in the general thought that the teaching in the 
Sunday school must be systematized and graded as is the education 
in the public school. As an example of the efforts along this line, 
I adduce the outline of a curriculum suggested by a well known 
Christian educator, and also a curriculum followed in a number of 
Jewish schools. According to the former plan, in the kindergarten 
(children to the age of six) religious conceptions are to be molded 
by stories, games and exercises. In the Elementary division there 
are eight grades with the work divided as follows : 

Grade I. (Age 6) Religious conceptions in detail, molded by 
stories, manual work, memorizing of simple passages. 

Grade II. (Age 7) Same work with greater deail, introduction 
of biography, memorizing of longer passages and short hymns. 

Grade III. (Age 8) Old Testament narratives; into this may be 
woven geography; using manual methods. 

Grade IV. (Age 9) Life of Jesus, following plan similar to 
Grade three. Make picture of Jesus. 

Grade V. (Age 10) Lives of the Apostles. Use the travel inter- 
est, manual methods, collect museum material. 



IMPROVED METHODS IN SUNDAY SCHOOL WORK 59 

Grade VI. (Age 11) A general introduction to the Bible. A 
year's survey of the whole using the Bible freely. Use man- 
ual methods freely. 

Grade VII. (Age 12) (a) Biography in the Old Testament, be- 
ginning of hero study. 

(b) Christian Biography beginning with Jesus. Have pupils 
work on the heroes of Christian history as they would on Wash- 
ington or Lincoln. 

Grade VIII. (Age 13) Church History, beginning with the 
"Acts" (first half of the year). Christian Missions (second 
half of the year). 

The Secondary Division is divided into four grades as follows: 

Grade I. (Age 14) Preparation for Church Membership; first 
half, the Christian life, develop in part by biographical studies. 
Second half: Christian Service; lead to enthusiasm for service 
in the Church. Keep in mind that these are " the decision 
years." 

Grade II. (Age 15) (a) Christian institutions. 

(b) Denominational life and polity. 

Grade III. (Age 16) Old Testament Literature. 

Grade IV. (Age 17) New Testament Literature, 

The Senior division had four grades also: 

Grade I. (Age 18) Historical Study of Biblical Literautre. 

Grade II. (Age 19) Advanced Life of Christ. 

Grade III. (Age 20) (a) Christian Evidences. 

(b) Christian Doctrines. 

(c) Practical Ethics. 

Grade IV. (Age 21) (a) Practical Christianity. Social Service, 
(b) Missions, Comparative Religions (See 
Cope, The Modern Sunday School, 
page 133-5). 
Jewish Schools have long been graded. Recently the kinder- 
garten grade has been added. The following is a curriculum fol- 
lowed in many schools. 

KINDERGARTEN : 

Selected Bible Stories told in very simple language. 

PRIMARY : 

Grade I. (Age 8) History Stories of the Patriarchs with stere- 
opticon views. 



60 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

Religion — God in Nature. Nature stories. 

Grade II. (Age 9) History — The Life of Moses (with stereop- 
ticon views.) Religion — Talks on home duties; Prayers in 
the home. 

Grade III. (Age 10) History — Joshua; The Judges (with stere- 
opticon views). Religion — Duties in school, to companions. 
Hebrew — Elementary words. 

Grade IV. (Age 11) History — Selected stories from the Books 
of Kings. Religion — The striking acts of the prophets. He- 
brew — Reading of words and sentences. 

Grade V. (Age 12) History — Post Biblical history; The Second 
Commonwealth 536 B.C. — 70 A.D.; Religion — Selected 
psalms with interpretation. Hebrew — Translation of por- 
tions of prayer book. 

Grade VI. (Age 13) History — The lives and teachings of the 
rabbis — 70 — 450 A.D. Religion. The development of 
Judaism. Hebrew-Translation of further prayers. 

Grade VII. (Age 14) History — the early mediaeval period 
450-1492. Religion. Judaism as creed and deed. 

Grade VIII. (Age 15) History, The later mediaeval period. 
1492-1789. Religion — The institutions of Judaism. 

Grade IX. (Age 16) History. The Modern Period. 1789 Re- 
ligion. The Reform Movement in Judaism. 

THE pupil: 

Perhaps the most marked feature of all modern pedagogical 
ejffort is the attention given to the needs of the individual pupil. 
The child is the center of interest. The child and the youth are 
being studied as never before; psychologists are devoting their 
best efforts to the attempts to understand child nature and the 
outlook of the adolescent. It is now felt that the material of the 
Bible and other ethical and religious instruction must be so sifted 
and arranged as to fit the developing nature of the pupil. For ex- 
ample, it being recognized that boys of ten and eleven are hero 
worshipers, such incidents of the Bible as cluster around heroic 
men of action are selected for instruction. In a word the pupil has 
now become the determining factor in Sunday school education; he 
is no longer considered as material to be fitted into a mold; the 
material of instruction is being so arranged as to fit his growing 
needs. The methods now employed are aimed as never before to 



IMPROVED METHODS IN SUNDAY SCHOOL WORK 61 

interest the child. Thus the stereopticon is brought into service. 
The lessons which the class has learned are pictorially represented 
by copies of fine paintings thrown upon the screen. The lessons 
thus visually presented are likely to make a lasting impression. 

New also is the manual work done by the children, like clay- 
modeling, moulding in pulp, map-drawing, coloring outlines of pic- 
tures, and so on. This work enlists the keen interest of the chil- 
dren and employs the play instinct for the higher purposes of edu- 
cation. The child that makes a relief map in clay or pulp of 
Jerusalem has a vivid knowledge of the Holy City that no learning 
from a printed page can give. 

A further feature of the work of many schools is the formation 
of boys' and girls' clubs. These are frequently class clubs which are 
organized for various purposes of good work that appeal to boys 
and girls ; these clubs are often the practical agencies which a wise 
teacher uses for the translation of the instruction into practice. 
The clubs are formed frequently for charitable purposes ; sometimes 
members of the club entertain shut-in children; again they devise 
unique plans for helping needy children. They thus learn to asso- 
ciate the Sunday school with good works and are made to feel that 
religion is the great uplifting influence of life. 

TEACHERS AND TEACHER-TRAINING: 

Just as the Sunday school has been so largely influenced by 
modern child-study in the matter of class grades and divisions, so 
also has there been a steady improvement in the teaching depart- 
ment. In an earlier day the volunteer superintendent and teacher 
who had no further preparation for the task but vrillingness to as- 
sist was quite universal. In truth, the willing but incompetent vol- 
unteer is still largely in evidence in many Sunday schools. It used 
to be supposed quite generally that all that was necessary was to 
give the lesson of the week into the hands of the volunteer teacher 
and the rest was easy. But changes in this regard have been pro- 
ceeding for many years past until now there is a well defined at- 
titude on the part of religious educators that the Sunday school 
teacher requires training as well as does the teacher of the public 
school. He must have method as well as willingness, information 
as well as spirit. In truth the preachers and school trustees of 
many churches aim to secure as far as they can public school teach- 
ers for the Sunday school, since the trained public school teacher. 



62 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

provided he or she is spiritually minded, makes the best Sunday 
school teacher. 

The recognition of the need of trained teachers has led to the 
establishment of departments of religious pedagogy in theological 
seminaries to enable candidates for the ministry to become fully 
equipped for the task of Sunday school leadership; various denom- 
inations have founded teachers' institutes whose sole purpose it is to 
train teachers for religious schools; in many large churches normal 
classes have been formed in which young men and women are trained 
for the work of teaching in the school; a feature of the Chautauqua 
Summer Assembly for years has been the courses offered for Sunday 
school teachers ; correspondence courses have been instituted whereby 
men and women all over the land receive the instruction which will 
enable them to take up the work of teaching in the Sunday school. 
Text books for teachers have been prepared by the education depart- 
ments of the different denominations. These text books in many 
instances have been written for men and women who have no especial 
Biblical education or training, and they thus supply the first step for 
a larger training. Some denominational theological institutions offer 
lecture courses for teachers by professors of the seminaries who go 
to such cities as may desire them. The lectures are open to the 
teachers of all the churches of that denomination. 

Because of the complete change in the idea of what the Sunday 
school should be, many churches are now expending large sums of 
money for its maintenance; it is recognized that a good teaching 
staff can be secured only if it is properly paid ; the unpaid volunteer 
is giving way more and more to the paid expert. In truth the 
vitality of the church is now largely judged by the efficiency of its 
educational department. The Sunday school, the adult Bible class, 
the reading classes, and other organizations give evidence of the 
large place which religious education is now taking in church 
activities. 

The thoroughness of the instruction is much hampered by 
the limited time at the disposal of the Sunday school. Instead 
of one, two or three hours devoted to such instruction, there should 
be much more time available. Because of this condition there are 
those who advocate religious instruction several times a week in the 
public schools. The suggestion is made that denominational teachers 
come to the public schools two afternoons in the week, and that the 
children of the school be divided according to their religious affilia- 



IMPROVED METHODS IN SUNDAY SCHOOL, WORK 63 

tion and receive instruction from teachers of their denomination. 
This is the custom in Germany, but if introduced in the United 
States, it would defeat the very purpose of the public school, for it 
would emphasize those distinctions which it is the object of the 
public school to overlook. The religious question must be kept out 
of the public school altogether. The Sunday school is so vital an 
institution in the United States because of the fundamental princi- 
ple of our government of the separation of church and state. 

In considering these improved methods in the Sunday school 
which have to do so largely with equipment, graded classes, clubs, 
and the like, the question becomes pertinent whether by paying so 
much attention to these things, the spiritual element is not lost sight 
of to too great a degree. This depends, as a matter of course, alto- 
gether upon the superintendent and the teachers. The fact of the 
matter is that the Sunday school must impart knowledge of a certain 
kind; the modern religious educators are seeking the best methods 
to instil this knowledge; the ignorance of the Bible is appalling (col- 
lege authorities have often commented upon the fact that college 
students are frequently unacquainted with familiar Biblical names 
and incidents). This information the Sunday school must give; in 
its higher grades it must also teach the new views of the books of the 
Bible as the production of many men of varying gifts and powers 
during a long stretch of time. There are also the allied subjects of 
Biblical institutions and archaeology, prophecy and poetry. The 
comparative study of other religions affecting Biblical institutions 
requires attention. For all such and kindred information, the Sun- 
day school must make provision. With sound information as a 
foundation, the spiritual interpretation will follow. 

The command was given of old, " Thou shalt teach them dil- 
igently to thy children." This meant religious instruction in the 
home. As modern life has shaped itself, most homes are neglectful 
of this primal duty, and it has been shifted to the Sunday school. 
Here the attempt is made to teach the lessons of religion and 
morality diligently to the children; from the kindergarten to the 
adult Bible class many of our Sunday schools are guiding the rising 
generation from year to year; the improvement in their methods is 
very striking ; in all truth during the past half century this work has 
proceeded from strength to strength. 



64 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 



MORAL INSTRUCTION AND TRAINING IN THE SUNDAY 
SCHOOLS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 

Professor George A. Coe 

UNION theological SEMINARY, NEW YORK CITY 

That Sunday schools are an important agent for the main- 
tenance of moral habits and ideals in the United States of America 
is not doubted by anyone who has intimate acquaintance with the 
life of our people. Partly as a consequence of the separation of 
religious instruction from State education, the Sunday school is here 
reaching a remarkable development. The number of pupils en- 
rolled is, in round numbers, sixteen million, and the number of teach- 
ers and officers is one and three-quarters millions. These schools, 
together with Catholic parochial schools, are nothing less than the 
beginning of a second great division of the American educational 
system, the first division being the schools of the State. 

The time is peculiarly opportune for inquiring into the ethical 
features of Sunday-school instruction and training, for our Prot- 
estant schools are in the midst of an advance movement that is just 
now freshly expressing the meaning of the whole system. To this 
movement and what it reveals I shall give my chief attention in 
what is to follow. But in order fully to understand the American 
situation certain other matters must also be taken into account. It 
should be remembered, for instance, that Catholic Sunday schools 
and parochial schools are in their own way consciously devoted to 
instructing and training children in the duties of the common life. 
For example, the course of study for the parochial schools of my 
own city (New York) includes for every grade both moral instruc- 
tion and moral practice. In some grades, at least, the instruction 
covers both the " natural " and the " supernatural " virtues. The 
practice is a systematic, graded training in matters of daily con- 
duct at home, in school, and on the street, as well as at church. 
(See Course of Study and Syllabus in Religion for Elementary 
Schools of the Archdiocese of New York. Published by the New 
York Catholic School Board, 1911.) 

It should be understood also that the advance movement al- 



MORAL EDUCATION IN SUNDAY SCHOOLS 65 

ready mentioned has not yet reached the majority of Protestant 
Sunday schools. The progressive plans and methods that I am 
about to describe have a background of much inertia^ traditionalism, 
and indefiniteness that may be described as a pre-educational con- 
sciousness. But a minority, already a large minority, of our schools 
is coming under the control of a definite notion of religious educa- 
tion. 

Now, religious education is by us in America everywhere un- 
derstood to include everyday morals. Our practical people can 
hardly conceive of religion in any other way. Here, where reli- 
gion has never had the prestige of an Establishment, where the cost 
is paid by voluntary contributions from the people, where prefer- 
ment rarely depends upon religious conformity — here religion 
naturally tends to fuse with moral ideals. Not that religion is 
supplanted by morals, as at least one European student has sup- 
posed. Far from it. But certainly America is taking seriously 
the ancient saying that " He who loveth not his brother whom he 
hath seen cannot love God, whom he hath not seen." This fusion is 
with us so universal that we assume as a matter of course that 
Sunday schools will deal with moral conduct. Hence, even schools 
that lack clear educational consciousness are nevertheless an im- 
mensely important agency for moral instruction and training, 

I shall now discuss moral instruction and training as they are 
found in the distinctly modern Protestant Sunday school. Two 
items will be considered, the curriculum and the practical activities. 
The tendency of the new graded curricula may be indicated by a 
brief description of the moral instruction provided in one of them. 
I take as my example the Fully Graded Bible Study Union Lessons 
(published by Charles Scribner's Sons). Here the pupil of six 
years is introduced, first of all, to stories (gathered from various 
sources) that are obviously intended to help the little one to make 
a proper adjustment to his present environment — to father, mother, 
big brother and sister, the household helpers, the letter carrier, the 
policeman, the food bringers, playmates, and domestic animals. 
For the autumn, when children of this age are expected to begin 
their day-school life, the Sunday lessons are planned with reference 
to the new social environment of classroom and playground. The 
same principle controls the selection of the story material for the 
second year, which concerns, in general, " learning to live happily 
together." Different groups of stories refer to " learning to be 



66 SECOND INTERNATIONAL, MORAL EDUCATION "CONGRESS 

obedient," " learning to be kind/' " polite," " helpful," and so on. 
The third year's stories, which are from the life of Jesus, are in- 
tended to show Jesus' " loving, helpful spirit, as he went about do- 
ing good." 

For children of nine and ten years the material consists of 
stories from the Old Testament. They are treated chiefly as in- 
stances of conduct, good and bad, rather than as parts of a con- 
nected history. Abraham is " a brave and generous pioneer," Re- 
bekah, " a maiden who was helpful," Jacob, " a son who deceived 
his father," Micaiah, " a man who dared to tell the truth." The 
center of the instructional method here used is the formation in the 
pupil's mind of a simple, vivid idea of a person or of an act that 
involves a moral issue and tends to evoke approval or condemnation. 
Of course there is also training in moral analysis, with provision 
for original expression. During the next two years (ages 11 and 
12) the pupil studies substantially the story material of the New 
Testament, together with stories of early martyrs and missionaries. 
Here, as in the earlier grades, emphasis is placed upon persons and 
their activities ; that is, the instruction is obj ective and concrete, 
and it concerns conduct. 

For the early adolescent years there is provided, first of all, 
for the age of thirteen, a series of biographical studies of heroic 
men and women. The characters are chosen, for the most part, 
from extra-biblical sources, and in many instances from outside 
the history of the church. John Howard, the champion of prison 
reform; Samuel Chapman Armstrong, a pioneer in the education of 
the American Negroes ; Harriet Beecher Stowe, who aroused the 
conscience of this nation against slavery; Florence Nightingale, a 
pioneer of the Red Cross movement; Chinese Gordon, a modern 
Sir Galahad ; George T. Angell, who " spoke for those that cannot 
speak for themselves," and Frances E. Willard, a pioneer in the 
higher education of women and in the temperance reform — all 
these stand in the same list with Abraham, Elijah, Amos, Wyclif, 
Savonarola, Luther, and Livingstone. 

The year that follows (age, 14) is entirely given to a study 
of the principles of conduct. First come twelve lessons on rights, 
or conduct considered from the standpoint of law. Here the ancient 
Hebrew legislation and the corresponding parts of our Common 
Law are presented side by side. It is interesting to note that the 
list of topics includes not only the ordinary rights of individuals. 



MORAL EDUCATION IN SUNDAY SCHOOLS 67 

but also the right of the State to honest service (a lesson on 
bribery). A second section of this year's work unfolds the stand- 
ards of sages and prophets as distinguished from the standards 
of mere law. Finally there is a section devoted chiefly to human 
relations considered according to the ideals of Jesus. 

Passing over the plan for the next four years with the single 
remark that, although the topics are largely historical, the ethical 
interest is prominent, I come at last to the closing year of the 
series, a course on the modern church, in which social work has a 
prominent place. The last section is on " The Church and the 
Social Awakening," under which title are included such topics 
as the industrial problem and how it arose, the welfare of wage- 
earners, race antagonisms, public charities, the liquor question, 
juvenile lawbreakers, prisons and prisoners, enemies of the fam- 
ily, the public schools, world peace, and church members as 
voters. 

Surely the place of moral instruction in this curriculum is a 
large one. And what is true of this plan of study is typical of the 
present movement in American Protestant Sunday schools. In 
nearly every instance those who have planned and prepared lesson 
courses have had in mind the moral problems that arise in the con- 
duct of children at various ages. One fully recognized principle 
of graded instruction is that the pupil is to be helped to live in right 
relations to his fellows here and now. Of course dogma and ec- 
clesiastical rites and ceremonies receive more emphasis in some cur- 
ricula than in others, but in all curricula of the later type moral 
conduct has a prominent place. In one notable instance not only 
the same curriculum but also the same text-books are in use in half 
a score of denominations that diifer from one another in dogmatic 
standards, in worship, and in church government. The ground of 
this cooperation is a community of spirit and ideals, or what may be 
called in a broad sense an ethico-religious unity. (See the Syndi- 
cate edition of the International Graded Lessons.) 

The situation may be further illustrated by a few items selected 
here and there from various curricula. Thus, the Episcopal Sunday 
School Commission Lessons, though they are the most churchly of 
all, include a course on Christian Ethics for Boys and Girls, with 
lessons on obedience, industry, perseverance, courage, justice, and 
so on. In the Beacon Lessons (Unitarian) the problems of the 
moral life are presented in a rich variety of tales from the my- 



68 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

thology and folklore of the Greeks, the Norsemen, the Hindus and 
other peoples, as well as from the Bible. 

In the Constructive Bible Studies (University of Chicago 
Press) such fables as " A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing," and such 
tales as "The Boy who called 'Wolf!'" stand side by side with 
Bible stories as material for instruction and training in obedience, 
truthfulness, generosity, and the like. Here we find, too, instruc- 
tion for little children concerning their relations to their country. 
In the Syndicate edition of the International Lessons one comes 
upon such typical things as the use of the story of the Garden of 
Eden to teach, not the course, but the blessing, of labor. Finally, 
this series, when it is complete, will include, for the adolescent 
years, a study of the moral-religious aspects of the leading occupa- 
tions, not excluding the occupation of home-making. 

Turning now to the training that is provided by means of 
practical activities, we come upon facts not less significant than 
those already described. We are unquestionably moving away from 
formal memoriter methods, and also from hortatory methods, toward 
what may be called the formation of character through self-ex- 
pression, especially in social action. Thus, for example, it is be- 
coming common to study Christian missions in connection with 
the actual support of missions. A class of children as young as 
eleven years has been known to collect a class fund and, through 
its own committee, to transmit the money to distant parts of the 
earth. Similarly, Sunday schools or classes in Sunday schools arc 
taking a direct part in various philanthropies, such as hospitals for 
children, day nurseries, famine funds, fresh air funds, and social 
settlements. Here and there a school has planned an entire cur- 
riculum of such activities parallel with the curriculum of instruc- 
tion, and forming a scheme of active expression of the instruction. 
Finally, there is a widespread effort to bring the pupil's Sunday 
school experience into unity with his ordinary weekday experience. 
To this end, classes are organized as clubs, with social, literary, 
athletic, philanthropic, and even civic functions. Adult classes, 
which have multiplied in recent years, are beginning to study the 
moral phases of community life, and to take an active part in vari- 
ous reforms. 

This whole movement is exceedingly vital; it is rapidly spread- 
ing, and it is bound to be a growingly efi'ective factor in the work of 
moral education. 



SELF-GOVERNMENT ANB MORAL EDUCATION 69 



SELF-GOVERNMENT AS A MEANS OF MORAL EDUCA- 
TION 

William R. George 

The delegates to the National Conference of Charities held in 
the city of Boston last year were given a steamboat excursion about 
Boston Harbor. Two bright looking lads were selling copies of 
The Survey to the excursionists. As one of these boys passed 
a group of delegates near whom the writer was standing, one of 
them turned to his companion and said, " That is one of the Judges 
we saw sitting at the Newsboys' Court last night dealing out fines 
and warnings to the young offenders who had violated their li- 
censes." " Yes, you are right. That is the lad," replied two or 
three of the party. 

Some of the group evidently knew little of the Newsboys* 
Court and began to inquire about it of those who had seen its 
workings. One of the party thereupon explained that the news- 
boys of Boston were organized into an association of which the 
members in good standing were licensed by the city to sell news- 
papers. As in all organizations, there were regulations and obli- 
gations, some of which were covered by city ordinances. In order 
to give the young members of this organization a sense of personal 
responsibility, some people interested in self-government had se- 
cured the adoption of measures permitting a body of judges, three 
of them to be newsboys elected by their fellows, and two adults, 
to serve as judges in the trial of newsboys who violated these regu- 
lations. The plan was tried with great success. The moral tone 
of the organization immediately changed for the better, and even 
the adults who had been incredulous in the beginning, became con- 
vinced of its usefulness. 

The evening before this excursion, many of the delegates had 
gone to the headquarters of the Newsboys' organization where the 
trials were held. Evidently all who saw the operation of that court 
were convinced of its vahie. " Yes," said one of the men, " I never 
felt more awe or reverence in the United States Supreme Court 
than I felt in the presence of those boy judges, and evidently 
every one else in the room, whether boy or man, had the same 



70 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

feeling. I don't know when they closed Court last night. They 
tried the little boys first and sent them home, and they were trying 
some of the older lads, and still had quite a bunch of them on hand, 
when we left." 

The writer listened to these comments in silence, but his heart 
fairly leaped with joy. It had been his privilege and pleasure to 
fan the flame which resulted in this Court, when its prospects had 
been discussed by a group of enthusiasts at dinner in the City 
Club of Boston. He rushed over to the lad and said, " You're 
one of the Judges of the Newsboys' Court, I understand." " Yes," 
replied the boy with an earnest straightforward look. " How do 
you like your job? " His face assumed a serious air. " In a way 
I like it," he replied, " but a feller has got to keep his eye peeled 
on himself, and his ' think-tank ' pretty clear." 

" I hear your Court sat till quite a late hour last night." 

" Yes," he said, " we had a good many cases to try." 

" How many sessions do you hold a week.^ " 

" One usually, and sometimes two." 

" How much money do you get for service on the bench ? " 

" Fifty cents from the city each evening we serve." 

" Who decides the number of evenings each week you shall hold 
trials ? " 

" We do, — the Judges." 

" If you wished to have a session every evening, could you do 
so.^ " 

" I think quite likely," he replied. 

" Why don't you hold more sessions of the court then instead 
of continuing them so late ? " 

" Because," he said, " we don't want to have it look as if we 
was graftin' off the city. We are there to do service for the city 
and for the Newsboys' Association." 

Thomas Mott Osborne, President of the Board of Trustees 
of the Junior Republic Association at Freeville, N. Y., notes the 
following incident in his introduction to my book: " The Junior 
Republic. Its History and Ideals": 

" Called to act as Judge in the Junior Republic Supreme 
Court, in a case which involved the question whether a prisoner 
who was a good football player should be released for the day in 
order to strengthen the Republic team, I listened to comprehensive 
arguments for continuing the temporary injunctioi;i I had granted. 



SELF-GOVERNMENT AND MORAL EDUCATION 71 

At the end of the speech the boy Judge of the Republic sat down, 
but almost immediately arose again. 'Your honor', said he, 'just 
one thing more. In most schools and colleges nowadays, a fellow 
has to gain a certain standard of scholarship in order to be a mem- 
ber of any athletic team. Now up here at the Junior Republic, 
our standard is citizenship, and if a fellow can't keep out of jail, 
he's no business to play on the football eleven." 

Those words sent a thrill through me as I sat upon the bench; 
they thrill me as I repeat them. " ' Our Standard is Citizen- 
ship \" 

Lyman Beecher Stowe of New York City, Secretary of The 
School Citizen's Committee, a voluntary organization, seeking to 
introduce self-government into the schools and the child-caring in- 
stitutions of America, tells, among many others, these two inci- 
dents illustrative of the moral influence of self-government upon 
children: In a certain large public school in New York City, 
where the pupils manage their own affairs and have a form of 
government roughly resembling that of an American State, the 
boy Governor was apparently reelected. He received the congratu- 
lations of his fellows and his teachers, was inaugurated, and started 
on his second term as chief-executive of his School State. After 
some weeks in office, the young Governor discovered that in count- 
ing the votes a certain room of younger children, only recently ad- 
mitted to the suffrage, had been accidentally omitted. He at once 
appealed to the Principal for a recount. The Principal demurred. 
He knew the young Governor's value as a helper, the school had 
settled down contentedly under his leadership, so why not let sleep- 
ing dogs lie? The boy finally insisted that he would have to re- 
sign unless the votes were recounted. Accordingly a recount was 
held in which the young Governor was counted out of office and his 
chief rival instated in his place. The new boy Governor then ap- 
pointed his defeated rival. Commissioner of Health, one of the most 
important offices in his gift. 

Another one of the self-governing schools in New York is 
known as the " Melting Pot." In it are seventeen different na- 
tionalities. The Italian and Jewish elements are dominant and 
numerically about equal. An Italian and a Hebrew boy were rival 
candidates for the office of Prosecuting Attorney. The Italians 
were backing their candidate and the Hebrews theirs until one of 
the leading Jewish boys at a midday rally made this appeal, " I 



72 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

want to tell you Jewish citizens that if you vote for Harry Cohen, 
you will make a big mistake. What do we want? A Prosecuting 
Attorney — a strong Prosecuting Attorney what's got the nerve to 
do his duty and not a Jewish Prosecuting Attorney! We want the 
best fellow we can get, and that fellow is Joseph Tooregrossa." 
Joseph got the bulk of the Jewish vote and was elected. 

If these few illustrations were the only occasions wherein self- 
government appeared as a moral force, the value of such training 
would not be completely demonstrated. Incidents like these are in 
fact almost of daily occurrence both in the Junior Republics, and 
in the schools and other institutions where self-government is 
practised. 

The original Junior Republic was established July 10th, 
1895. The very first day we announced that we proposed to estab- 
lish an actual government of the youth, for the youth, and hy the 
youth. In other words, the Junior Republic was to be a village 
like any other in the United States except that the citizens were 
to reach their voting age at sixteen instead of twenty-one. The 
principles of the community should be those imderlying self-gov- 
ernment and self-support. 

This idea, revolutionary though it was from the point of view 
of the universal institution and school system of that time, was 
absolutely safe and sane if boys and girls from sixteen to twenty- 
one were to any considerable degree capable of assmning the re- 
sponsibilities heretofore exercised solely by men above the age 
of twenty-one. 

The year before the starting of the Republic, in a summer 
camp at Freeville, I had required a company of boys and girls to 
meet many of the responsibilities of self-government and self-sup- 
port, and they had risen to the emergency. 

It was not particularly surprising, even to the layman of that 
day, that these young people should rise to the emergency of self- 
support, for illustrations of this in every day life were plentiful. 
Both boys and girls had frequently supported themselves on the 
farm, in the store or in the shop, or at domestic service. In many 
instances, the world offered illustrations of youth, who had not 
only supported themselves but had helped in the support of their 
families. Practically everybody pointed with pride to the self- 
made man — the man who had early learned the art of " earning 
his bread by the sweat of his brow." In fact, every one agreed 



SELF-GOVERNMENT AND MORAL. EDUCATION 73 

that when the struggle for existence is not too severe^ every youth 
after his early teens is helped materially for life's hardships by 
practical experience in self-support. If practical training in self- 
support were of moral educational value to youth, why should not 
self-government likewise be of value? Logical as this appeared, 
we searched in vain for precedents. Here and there history shows 
youthful kings who, like Alexander the Great, below the age of 
twenty-one years, had done more than practice self-government in 
ruling over nations; but most people would give as the reason for 
their ability the fact that they were born rulers. Nowhere in our 
own National Government for three quarters of a century could we 
find illustrations of youth practising self-government, " because," 
declared the world, " they are infants." Immature lads and las- 
sies, they would say, could not be expected to have sufficient moral 
development to be allowed such responsibilities as self-government 
implied. Instead of learning by doing such an important matter 
as self-government, they must be " preached at " by the older and 
wiser ones until the eve of their twenty-first birthday. 

How miraculous ! The youth would go to bed an infant and 
the following morning " infancy " would be officially a thing of the 
past; he would rise from his bed, like Minerva from Jove's fore- 
head, a full blown citizen. Yes, the sturdy intelligent lad, physic- 
ally and mentally as fit as the average man, was an infant in the 
eyes of the law and society, exercising none of the moral respon- 
sibilities of citizenship. During such halcyon periods, no single 
illustration of civic responsibility for youth could be found. But 
when grim war overtook the nation, the whole situation was in- 
stantly changed. The nation no longer regarded as infants these 
lads from sixteen to twenty-one. The call to arms had transformed 
them into men as miraculously as would their twenty-first birth- 
days. Statesmen, orators and journalists electrified the world as 
they portrayed the great achievements of the nation's men on 
the battlefield. With pride we in America speak of the way our 
men have made and saved our country by force of arms; but an 
examination of the war records shows that those whom in time of 
peace we declare to be men have formed a comparatively small 
percentage of our citizen soldiery. The fellows who won the bat- 
tles were those officially labeled "infants" in time of peace; an 
overwhelming majority of both armies in our great Civil War was 
composed of youth from sixteen to twenty-one. 



74 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

It was not our men who saved our nation: it was our boys. 
Was less expected of a soldier of sixteen than one of thirty-five? 
By no means, and the boys rose to the mighty emergency and re- 
sponsibility as readily as the men. Nor were the boys limited to 
service in the ranks; many of them were commissioned officers. 
In many a crisis when a nation's life was at stake, the keen and 
accurate judgment of mere boys went a long way toward saving 
the Union. But when peace was restored, these same boys were 
promptly relegated to legal " infancy " ! War is terrible, but 
it is argued with a grain of truth, that one of its compensations is 
the fact that through the tremendous responsibilities it places upon 
the youth in its service, it brings to the fore splendid leaders who 
otherwise would have been lost in oblivion for lack of opportunity 
to early develop individual responsibility. Self-control and re- 
sponsibility are necessary attributes to self-government. No in- 
dividual or nation can claim to be self-governing without these 
qualities. If therefore, youth are instantly transformed by having 
responsibility thrust upon them in time of war, why should they 
not have responsibilities in time of peace? 

My experience with youth of all classes and conditions of so- 
ciety has led me to believe that a large percentage of the disasters 
to youth in general occur because they are regarded as irresponsible 
beings. It is humiliating for any group of people no matter what 
their age, nationality or creed, to be regarded as irresponsible. 
Individuals feeling no responsibility to the community where they 
live, or even to a country wherein they are merely sojourning, can- 
not rise to the highest and best within them. For example, a com- 
pany of ordinarily self-respecting Americans might be traveling in 
Germany. While seated together in one of the beautiful parks 
of some German city, they might see a group of native vandals 
uprooting some flowers. Their sense of propriety might be shocked, 
but that would be all. Their comment would probably be, "It is 
none of our business. Let the Germans look after their own 
parks." How differently these same Americans would act if they 
caught vandals in the act of destroying flowers in some park near 
their own homes in America ! 

At the present time woman's suff'rage in America is a live issue. 
I have traveled in States where the women vote and where they 
do not. In the States where they do exercise the franchise, the re- 
sponsibility of citizenship has made them a vital integral part of 



SELF-GOVERNMENT AND MORAL EDUCATION 75 

the civic life and of great moral value to the state. In States 
where they do not vote, with of course some marked exceptions, 
there seems to be a tendency on the part of the great majority of 
women to be indifferent to civic responsibilities. 

Many other illustrations might be given in this connection 
where a group of individuals, held together by religious, political 
or racial bonds, reside in a community where another religious, po- 
litical, or racial group is in an overwhelming majority. Although 
there may be no open hostility on the part of the stronger group 
toward the weaker or vice versa, nevertheless, in the event of some 
function belonging strictly to one and not to the other, the group 
debarred will feel little responsibility for the actions of the ma- 
jority. The whole point of the previous reasoning is this, that 
the youth of our country from sixteen to twenty-one years of age, 
provided they are physically and mentally up to the standard of 
their years, are practically able to assume the responsibilities of 
citizenship, although the world has not yet come to recognize this 
truth. As a result, there are several millions of stalwart youth 
who are theoretically and officially regarded as " infants." The 
feeling that they have no part or lot in the government of the 
nation causes them to feel little or no responsibility for civic wel- 
fare. Instinctively they have a fellow feeling for every youth in 
the land who has some difficulty with officialdom. There is a sort 
free masonry amongst the youth of every country. The lad who 
does some dare-devil act against property, and even the man, has 
the secret admiration of practically every youth in the land, yes, 
even good boys admire the youthful outlaw. I recall my personal 
experience in this connection. Jesse James, the American outlaw, 
was in his palmiest days when I was a youth. I think I was not 
more than commonly bad and neither were my companions. Yet 
we certainly gloated over his hair-raising escapades. To be sure, 
we wanted him to be killed in course of time, but to give his death 
proper setting we felt it must come after a terrible slaughter of 
sheriffs and deputy sheriffs; and to make the tragedy completely 
picturesque, he must die with his " boots on." Social workers of 
all sorts, in discussing the causes of the depravity of youth, cite 
reasons at great length. They mention depraved home surroundings, 
physiological defects, etc., etc. No doubt they are largely correct, 
but I want to tell you a secret. One of the principal reasons why 
youth are lawless and do criminal things is because whenever they 



76 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL tJ^UCATlON CONGKESS 

do commit a serious crime and get their names in the paper, they 
know that they have the admiration, albeit sometimes the secret ad- 
miration, of practically every youth in the land. For proof of this 
statement, listen to the discussions of the crime of some youth by the 
members of a street gang. Likewise listen to the discussions of the 
same youth's performance by the lads in any public school, when 
they don't know you are listening. Don't stop even at the public 
schools, go to the Sunday schools and you will hear them discussing 
the dare-devil act with bated breath. And the hero of it all knows 
he is in the limelight and looks eagerly for the big headlines in the 
daily papers to see whether the details of his crime are described 
with ample picturesqueness. 

A few years later, when these self-same youth have reached 
their majority, are taking part in government, and are working for 
their living, they do not look with admiration upon a young dare- 
devil, but denounce his acts and characterize him as a menace to 
society and a criminal. Why this changed point of view? Simply 
because they have come to the point where, instead of being irre- 
sponsible onlookers, they have the full powers of citizenship and the 
responsibilities of self-support. I verily believe that if the full 
responsibilities of self-government, or something approximating to 
it, were bestowed on physically and mentally able youth some years 
earlier than at present, our country would be much better oif in 
every way. 

Well — to make a long story short — after searching in vain 
for instances of self-government amongst youth in practical form, 
we determined boldly to establish the precedent ourselves. As 
already stated, on July tenth, 1895, the plan was put in operation. 
The results were immediate and satisfactory. The young people 
rose to the emergency. Actual responsibility for their government 
changed the point of view which they had previously held regarding 
lawless youth. Two kinds of legislation confronted them for im- 
mediate action — legislation, economic in its nature, and legislation 
relating to moral conditions. In their law-making on economic 
matters they made some mistakes — if they had not, they would have 
far excelled adults. Then with delightful disregard for the cum- 
bersome precedents and traditions of older society, they would at 
once change things for the better. When it came to moral legis- 
lation, or anything which bordered upon it, they were always strong 
ifor righteousness. In some cases they might have been regarded 



SELF-GOVERNMENT AND MORAL, EDUCATION 77 

as a bit puritanical. Without any suggestion from adults^ they 
passed and enforced laws making profanity and gambling punish- 
able by fine or imprisonment; obscene conversation was constituted 
a felony, and the culprit imprisoned just as if he had stolen money. 
They even have a law prohibiting the use of tobacco in any form. 
These instances, together with numerous others of a like nature, 
demonstrate conclusively that self-government is a moral educator 
with a vengeance. 

Boys and girls who have had nothing bad in their record come 
to the little Republic and take upon themselves the responsibilities 
of citizenship. Their development in thrift, industry, civic respon- 
sibility, tact and self-reliance is noticeable even to the casual ob- 
server. The criticism that such responsibilities may make them pre- 
maturely old is not justified by the facts; no group of youth enjoys 
sports and gets more happiness out of life generally than the young 
citizens of a Junior Republic. But it is in the dare-devil, lawless, 
and what is sometimes called " the criminal " element of youth, that 
the greatest transformations occur. These fellows who have been 
heroes because of their thrilling escapades with the police and others 
in authority, come to a Junior Republic in place of going to a re- 
formatory. Upon their arrival, to gain standing for themselves 
with the residents of the Republic, they proceed to tell what terrors 
they have been in the world outside. This is the usual method of 
newcomers for gaining standing for themselves when sent to a Re- 
form School. But alas ! this generally successful method is always 
a dismal failure in a Junior Republic. In an institution, benevolent 
despotism holds sway and dispenses free food, lodgings, clothing, 
etc., according to a system, and anything which smacks of personal 
responsibility is religiously avoided. In a Junior Republic the new- 
comer finds himself a part of a little community the members of 
which work for their property and secure little or much according 
to their industry and use the powers of citizenship to protect their 
property and person against the lawless. It is a far cry from being 
a dependent inmate to being a self-directed citizen. The fellow 
who has been out of gear with society and proud of the fact, is 
quite likely in the early days of his citizenship in a Junior Republic 
to commit some act of lawlessness. He is thereupon arrested by an 
officer approximately his own age; hailed in to court and tried for 
the violation of a law enacted by his fellows. If found guilty by 
a jury of his peers, he is sentenced by a youthful but just Judge to 



78 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

the prison where he is taken in hand by the boy keeper and com- 
pelled to do penal service for the little State. No government of 
adult manufacture^ to which he feels no responsibility, has anything 
to do with him in this affair. His companions are regulating him, 
and that takes all the romance out of wrong doing. Every one of 
us recalls that in our youthful days what our companions thought 
of us was of much more importance to us than the opinion of grown 
people. 

When the young " hoodlum " gets out of a Junior Republic 
prison, he determines to do right, not because he has been reformed, 
but because he wants to be popular with his fellows. He finds it 
politic to be honest. Truly, a rather low standard, but the only one 
which he is capable of appreciating at once. Through the various 
forces in operation in the little commonwealth, he advances grad- 
ually to higher standards. Self-support is no small factor, but 
greater than this is the exercise of the duties of citizenship. He 
is a part of the people. He realizes his power as a citizen, for he 
hears a measure discussed in the town meeting and then put to the 
vote of the citizens. Behold ! he is one of the voters. The measure 
passes. In less than an hour it is signed by the boy President. It 
then becomes a law and goes into effect, and he at once realizes his 
individual power in the community. He sits on a jury when some 
boy is tried, as he was tried a few months before and he feels his 
duty to act justly in the case. This responsibility develops him 
immeasurably. He becomes an officer on the police force of the 
little Republic. His duties are to see that the laws are enforced. 
Another stage comes in his development. All around him, every- 
where he turns, is civic and moral responsibility. During this plas- 
tic stage of development he is unconsciously, yet naturally, being 
controlled by these same civic and moral responsibilities. Some 
day he may be a Judge, or perhaps even President of a Junior Re- 
public, and he realizes that in order to occupy these exalted posi- 
tions, he must be " straight " ; for he observes that character is the 
thing which usually counts most with his fellow citizens when they 
elect a fellow to these high positions. Slowly but surely, by these 
means he rises from the low standard of doing right for policy's 
sake to the point where he will do right for its own sake. This was 
exemplified in the case of a boy who was elected to the Republic 
Presidency by the unanimous vote of his fellow citizens. The day 
after his inauguration he came to me in great distress and said, 



MORAL EDUCATION AND THE SELF-DIRECTING GROUP 79 

" Daddy, some months ago, before I was thought of as worthy of 
being President, I committed a theft in this Republic. I have come 
to tell you about it and ask your advice." Instead of giving advice, 
I finally asked him what he was going to do about it? I saw a 
determined look on his face. " Daddy," (that's what the citizens 
call me), he replied, " I am going to call the citizens together, tell 
them what I've done, resign my position, surrender myself to the 
police and go to jail." His crime would never have been found 
out, but his conscience won't let him do anything else. Heroically 
— you can readily understand it required the rarest heroism — he 
faced the ordeal and went to prison. Other Junior Republics, 
founded since the original one at Freeville, N. Y., have the same 
testimony to offer. 

Soon after the Junior Republic idea was launched, pupil self- 
government was introduced into certain public schools. Other or- 
ganizations of young people also soon fell into line. At first I 
doubted the possibility of making self-government vital and effective 
in schools and other organizations where there could be little or no 
property basis and where the boys and girls lived at home instead 
of in a community of their own, but on investigating its operation 
in schools I found to my great gratification that the force of or- 
ganized public opinion was sufficient to overcome both these handi- 
caps. 

A government of the youth, for the youth and by the youth has 
now been not a theory but an accomplished fact for seventeen years. 
It has evolved, as Professor Liberty Hyde Bailey, Dean of the 
Cornell College of Agriculture, has well said, " from a reformatory 
idea to a great educational principle." During this period edu- 
cators by the scores, from all over the world, have critically studied 
the idea in actual operation, and almost without exception they have 
testified to its great moral value. 



THE RELATION OF MORAL EDUCATION TO THE 
SELF-DIRECTING GROUP. 

Dr. John L. Elliott. 

One of the chief difficulties that the teacher of ethics has to 

overcome is the sense of aloofness from life of that which he tries 

to impart. Even when he has been successful in kindling the glow 

of enthusiasm in the pupils, he knows that they may leave the class- 



80 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MOEAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

room only to have their emotional fervor fade and only to fall 
back into the same habits of thought and action as before. Espe- 
cially will this be true when the life of the home or the play- 
ground does not exemplify what he has been striving to teach. 
Even where the ethics instruction is systematic and the pupils have 
had laid before them year after year a progressive series of ideals, 
and the attempt has been made to inculcate the habits of clear 
thinking and right feeling on moral questions, the pupils who are 
not in the habit of making real the ideals and rekindling the emo- 
tions in themselves will receive but little benefit. 

The will of the pupils is that which, in the last analysis, the 
teacher is trying to affect. The will which has been enlightened, 
stirred, and which has formed for itself right habits of action 
is our goal of striving. 

I do not mean in any way to minimize the value of systematic 
ethical instruction in classes but simply to indicate that the pupil 
needs what may be called laboratory practice in morals under the 
guidance of one more experienced than himself. It is for this 
reason that the self-directing group or, as we commonly say, the 
sel£-governmg group, admirably supplements the work of moral 
instruction. Without such a group, moral instruction is likely to 
retain its aloofness ; without ethics lessons on the other hand, the 
spirit of the self-governing group is likely to become stale, petty 
and dead to the finer visions. The ethics lesson interprets and 
makes clear to the mind the finest things of life; the self-govern- 
ing group makes a beginning at trying to realize them. 

The pupils, however, cannot be self-directing during the courses 
of ordinary instruction. Here the teacher possesses an authority 
which he cannot abdicate. 

A larger field for laboratory practice is opened when the teacher 
takes part with his pupils in their sports or other activities outside 
the classroom. And yet for all its value in this direction, sport 
is limited in its usefulness because its aims howsoever appealing, 
are not of the most elevated character and do not give opportunity 
for the exercise of the finer faculties in all their completeness. 

For this reason it is of immense gain when the pupils organize 
themselves to carry on some work of a philanthropic nature or to 
further in some way the life of the school. Much time has been 
spent in developing through the activities of the school, what may 
be called the virtues of the individual; but young people receive 



MORAL EDUCATION AND THE SELF-DIKECTING GROUP 81 

only scant help in acquiring practice in what may be called the 
social virtues. They band themselves naturally together in clubs 
for athletic purposes; but little use has as yet been made of this 
social tendency and it is rare that the teacher uses the natural 
fraternity spirit among young people to its fullest capacity for 
noble employment. In America we put the vote into the hands 
of every young man at the age of twenty-one; yet frequently he is 
little enough prepared by actual experencc of the deeper side of 
group or social life to understand in any way, except often in the 
most academic fashion, what democratic government really entails. 
What I have to say of self-government applies chiefly to pupils 
of the high school age, that is from thirteen to eighteen ; but classes 
so organized not infrequently may be very instructive to a pupil and 
helpful to the teacher in the seventh and eighth grades, that is be- 
tween the ages of eleven and thirteen. Except in rare instances, chil- 
dren under this age depend very largely for guidance on their elders 
and seldom are capable of the well-considered action which is 
necessary to really effective or independent group life. Of course 
at a much earlier period, they become conscious of belonging to a 
group; but they need much more careful direction and are not 
nearly so capable as the older ones of action independent of the 
immediate help of the teacher. After the age of ten, however, it 
seems to me exceedingly valuable if each group is organized to 
carry on certain specific kinds of activity. All young people and 
children delight in choosing their own officers and organizing them- 
selves into little societies. Let them form such groups; but let 
it be borne in mind that the art of a teacher must come in to sug- 
gest the kind of activities most suitable to each age and group. As 
a rule, self-government has meant turning over to the children 
certain police functions, the task of keeping themselves in order 
or rather of keeping each other in order. The police functions, it 
would seem, however, are not the best social activities with which 
to begin. Furthering some object in which pupils are naturally in- 
terested, arranging for class entertainments — a program for school 
assemblies, athletic games, patriotic meetings in which the school 
takes part, philanthropic work or commemoration exercises of his- 
torcal events — in short actually doing together something con- 
structive is much better than trying to keep each other from doing 
certain things. To pass upon the conduct of other children may 
indeed be one of the most useful of the later functions for the 



82 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

representatives of self-governing groups ; but at the beginning, it is 
surely much better to give the children something of a more posi- 
tive nature. 

All of us remember some little experience of our childhood 
when, by accident, we met a blind man, let us say, and helped him 
across the street. We can recall the thrill that came from actually 
having been of use. The teacher can see to it that his pupils all 
meet such unforgettable experiences. 

Care must be taken to avoid unfortunate accidents. Little 
children may not be sent promiscuously among the poor nor to the 
wards of a hospital; but it has been my experience that the chil- 
dren of a group who send a Christmas box to a family may also 
send one or two delegates with the teacher to visit it. If the 
teacher is wise, he can remind the class of the other needs of the 
family than a few sweets at Christmas — the handicaps under 
which it labors, such as poverty, ignorance, difficulty of getting 
work, high rents. All these come home to the young as great 
realities and not only stir them to help the family in a more steady 
way, avoiding the attitude of the Lady Bountiful, but really assist 
them to see the problems of the poor after a fashion that will make 
-them helpful members of society through the rest of their lives. 

After a beginning in group work has been made in some such 
enterprises as these, the class may then be readily led to take up 
some of the work of carrying on the school, some of the drudgery 
perhaps, this to be done not by monitors nor by appointees of the 
teacher but by representatives chosen by the class. Choosing for 
themselves, the pupils learn the inestimable value of judging others 
of their own age on grounds of merit and not in accordance with 
their own likes and dislikes. This is in itself a great moral gain. 

The self-governing class meets other classes in athletic games 
and in school assemblies, and the activity of group life becomes 
enlarged by the consideration of the whole school as a group of 
which the class members are a part not only as individuals but as 
members of groups and sub-groups. The notion of divided loyalties 
and responsibilities now comes home to them. Only after they 
have once conceived vitally and not academically the relation of the 
school groups to each other, can they be made to understand the 
life of the city, state and nation. 

Organization and government come as a natural result of the 
desire to achieve certain ends. It seems to me, therefore, that 



MORAL EDUCATION AND THE SELF-DIRECTING GROUP 83 

the form of self-government adopted should be related inherently 
to the needs of the children. We have our schools modeled after 
the city and the nation. I am somewhat skeptical as to both of 
these plans. It is indeed of value to be using the same terminology 
• as that of the city or state, but there is a certain pompousness about 
little mayors and presidents that is in some ways objectionable.^ 
We are likely, too, not to invent exactly the right kind of organiza- 
tion when we copy those of adults. This is not a fundamental 
point, however; and any organization may be used that can be 
adapted to the needs of childhood, with such officers, constitutions 
and rules as will help best, provided only that they are fashioned 
so as really to fit the work and not that the work must be made 
to fit the organization. Such life vivifies and makes dynamic the 
social-ethics teaching as perhaps nothing else can, and gives a 
great stimulus also to the discussion of the self-regarding duties. 
Any consideration of group activity such as has been mentioned 
would be altogether inadequate if the esprit de corps thus created 
were not taken into account. I am sure those who have worked 
in self-government, as exemplified in the Ethical Culture School, 
in the " School Cities," as they are to be found in many places in 
America, and in the George Junior Republic, have found that per- 
haps the most valuable element of all is the fraternal relations 
into which the pupils enter. Ordinarily pupils get the impression 
that the teacher is in a way making the moral law himself as he 
goes along. They somehow feel that they are responsible to each 
other only through the teacher. But the most effective kind of 
moral training makes the pupil feel a sense of his own responsi- 
bility for thinking out right ways of acting for himself and for 
his group. 

This begets a finer kind of friendship and fraternity than will 
grow in any other soil. The pursuance of fine aims in common has 
ever been the basis on which the finest friendships grew — all his- 
toric friendships had such a basis. One has only to remember the 
results of the Sacred Band of Thebes, the Tugendbund of the 
German Universities and the Burschenschaften in the earlier days 
of their existence, the Chartist movement in England and similar 
groups of young men in Ireland, Italy and Russia, to realize the 

[1 Editorial Note. — For answers to the various objections urged against 
such schemes, consult " Some Facts About Pupil Self-Government," a 
pamphlet obtainable gratis from Mr. Richard Welling, 2 Wall Street, 
New York.] 



84 SECONB INTERNATIONAL MOEAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

importance of this aspect of the subject. The young idealists were 
often wrong-headed, they were always in need of guidance from 
those who were older; but the records of every nation show into 
what splendid men and women they developed. In youth the moral 
ideal which appeals strongest is perhaps that of justice; the 
strongest emotion is that of fraternity; and if we can couple these 
two and give the pupils the idea that they are no mere abstract 
concepts, but stand for a kind of life that they may lead in their 
fellowships, we shall have crossed the gulf and made our lessons 
not mere prosy or emotional talk, but genuine influences upon the 
lives of our future citizens. 

It may seem to some that all this is but a new fad in educa- 
tion, a kind of excrescence on the real body of school- work; but 
after eighteen years of experience as a teacher and a varied ac- 
quaintanceship with children and young people from nearly all the 
social classes and races in America, I have come to believe that 
it is a vital and essential element. Whether the lessons imparted 
(by the teacher be in the field of ethics or science or art, the danger 
always exists of their not taking hold or remaining just as they 
were given and without power to create new thought and life. All 
who are to receive a genuine impulse from the ethics lessons must 
in some way, I think, become active, both the individuals as indi- 
viduals and the group as a whole. Just as we have a carefully 
planned curriculum of studies, so we should have in every school 
carefully planned series of activities for the diiferent classes. We 
should know what kind of organization is most fitted for each 
group ; and the constitutions or the laws and rules which it makes 
should show a constant progression from year to year. Thus we 
shall be able to get away from the old idea of classroom work, 
which has so often failed to do all that we had hoped it would 
do, get away also from the mere careless club or gang and form 
a new kind of group, one that receives suggestions but not orders 
from the teacher, one in which a more valuable and deeper fra- 
ternity may grow among the pupils and which may, at the same 
time, foster a better friendship for the teacher and an apprecia- 
tion of him as interpreter not only of individual morals but of the 
ethics of social groups and nations. 



MORAL EDUCATION IN COLLEGES 85 



NOTE ON MORAL EDUCATION IN THE AMERICAN COL- 
LEGES AND UNIVERSITIES 

Professor Edwin Caldwell Moore 

For the moral training of the youth in American Colleges, in 
former times the service of worship and instruction in the College 
Chapels was mainly relied upon. In practically all of them at- 
tendance of students upon these services was at one time compul- 
sory. In many it is so still. In the great institutions founded in 
more recent years by the states and supported from the public 
treasury, the maintenance of such religious services by the univer- 
sities themselves was of course impossible. Voluntary bodies unde- 
nominational in character, like the Christian Association, have, to 
a certain extent, filled the place. Churches of the various com- 
munions about the university do what they can to supplement this 
work of the students themselves. In a few cases, in endowed uni- 
versities, a religious service is officially maintained, to which an 
undenominational character is given through the ministration of a 
board of preachers chosen from different sects. In several of the 
more conspicuous cases of this sort, attendance is voluntary, both 
upon Sunday and at daily prayers, and a measurable success is 
achieved in the effort to represent the freedom and unity of the re- 
ligious life. 

In almost all American Colleges and Universities, study of the 
Bible and of related subjects is carried on in voluntary classes 
among the students. In some cases properly conducted courses of 
this sort have been taken up into the regular curriculum and work 
done is counted toward the degree. In the Universities, properly 
so called, many courses offered by members of the theological facul- 
ties are open to students from any department in the university 
and, conversely, courses in all subjects germane to the work of the 
ministry are open to theological students, though offered by others 
than the members of the divinity faculties. Through this study of 
economics and sociology and philosophy by those looking forward 
to the ministry and of history and philosophy of religion, of ethics 
and biblical subjects by those not proposing the clerical life and 
service, much has been done to break down the barrier which used 



86 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

to divide those pursuing so-called sacred subjects from those fol- 
lowing secular themes. The uniformity of standard and the inter- 
course of the men has been most salutary. 

But the greatest contribution to the moral life and training of 
American students, in later years, has come from, the development 
of the social service work. In all larger Colleges and Universities 
there exist organizations, which have for their purpose the prosecu- 
tion of charitable and philanthropic service, altruistic work of every 
sort which can be deemed appropriate to students as a class. In 
many colleges a house exists to serve as the central bureau for such 
work, a salaried secretary presides over this bureau and mediates 
between those members of the student body who volunteer for such 
work and the institutions of the city and of the surrounding coun- 
try which may call these privileged youth for their aid. In the 
year just closing Princeton enrolled 90 volunteers in such service, 
Pennsylvania University 100, Yale 350, and Harvard 360. In the 
latter case the number of members of the various religious organi- 
zations all told was about 1,000. The total number of undergradu- 
ates was about 2,250, and the organizations spoken of are here al- 
most entirely undergraduate organizations. Thus it appears that 
almost half of the men in the college, properly so called, are the 
members of some religious organization, and of this half more than 
one-third was engaged in some form of social service. Most of the 
men thus voluntarily employed gave to their work of this sort as 
much as an evening a week. Preparation is being made to extend 
this work into the professional schools and also to secure the con- 
tinuance of similar work on the part of the men after they shall 
have left the university. The contribution is thus a worthy one to 
the moral life of the community in which the university is situated. 
But of perhaps far greater value is the reflex action upon the men 
themselves at this formative period in their lives. Nothing in the 
university commits the men more surely to right courses and trains 
them up in the enthusiasm of the moral and social life, the life of 
service and, if need be, of suffering, that reason and the will of 
God may prevail. 



CONSCIOUS PURPOSE AND BRAIN DEVELOPMENT 87 

CONSCIOUS PURPOSE AND BRAIN DEVELOPMENT. 

Mrs. Vance Cheney. 

The whole round world of thinking men and women was 
startled about a half century ago when Darwin announced his 
theory of evolution and when Huxley stated that the brain of an 
anthropoid ape is constructed so nearly like a man's brain that the 
difference is not worth considering. Were the thinking people 
of this same round world not so dazed by newly discovered won- 
ders as to be almost blase, they might have been equally startled 
by the statement of Dr. Wm. Hanna Thompson, the noted brain 
specialist of New York, that " we make our own brains so far as 
mental functions or aptitudes are concerned, if only we have wills 
strong enough to take the trouble." 

He says further: "If a human personality would enter a 
young chimpanzee's brain where it would find all the required 
cerebral convolutions, that ape could then grow into a true in- 
venter or philosopher." That is to say, the ape, our next of kin, 
might be all that our greatest minds have been, had he in his 
body the something that we are, and that we call by the several 
names Ego, Personality, Will, Soul. But this wildwood ancestor of 
ours has not this glory which is the real man and " in the process 
of the Suns " is to make him a god. He has not that image and 
likeness of the Supreme Almighty Reality that makes man, all 
men, free in the republic of mind, free to discover laws and 
principles, free to live up to these laws and principles and free to 
become perfect " as your Father in heaven is perfect." He has 
not that immaterial something which is our ability " to make our 
own brains so far as special mental functions or aptitudes are 
concerned, if we have the will strong enough to take the trouble." 

It is special mental functions that one requires who suffers 
from fear, apprehension, weakness of will, depression, melancholy, 
jealousy, envy, anger, hatred and other useless and unworthy states 
of mind, tendencies inherited from our less than human ancestors. 
It is " special mental aptitude " that the student of art, music, 
mathematics, mechanics and all branches of learning and handi- 
craft is seeking as he aims to progress. In the light of modern 
science, these gifts " like Heaven are given away " and " like God 
may be had for the asking." 



88 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

The process of self-construction^ Dr. Thompson tells us^ is 
after this fashion: " The will stimulus will not only organize 
brain centers to perform new functions^ but will project new 
connecting or associating fibers which will make nerve centers 
work together as they could not without being thus associated. A 
person, therefore, acquires new brain capacities by acquiring new 
anatomical bases for them in the form of brain cells which he has 
trained, and of actively working brain fibers, which he himself has 
created." 

A child learning to use its hands and feet, is unconsciously, by 
unconscious choice, developing thousands of the little nerve fibers, 
which, responding to his desire to handle things and to move his 
feet, grow out from the brain down toward the spinal column and 
finally linking up with it give him his desired command. This 
desire, which we may call the sub-conscious will of the child, 
coursing through the cells impels them to growth; and gradually 
as the connection becomes more perfect and the motor area of the 
brain more developed, he becomes more adroit in the use of his 
hands and feet until he controls them. 

Here, too, is the story of speech of the whole speaking race. 
Literally without understanding of anything, and without a word, 
we find ourselves at the start. Five senses man had in common 
with the quadruped, and the power of muscular movement was 
there, as the heart and stomach were there; but the power of 
speech did not exist. In " the first dumb pair," there could have 
been no consciousness that such a gift as words might come. But 
the soul that man is, caged in its mute instrument, rose in its 
divine might. It longed for deliverance. It longed for com- 
munication with other beings; and the gesticulations that conveyed 
emotion, the emotion of joy or pain, of approval or disapproval, 
from one to another in a sound or gasp of some sort, we may 
safely say gave birth to vocal expression; and this gasp, these 
sounds shaped themselves eventually into words. Words came 
because the soul wanted them, worked for them, and, in the be- 
ginning as now, the benign creating power that is always doing 
something, and the something we bid it do, wove the first, the next, 
and each succeeding effort at speech into a definite home in brain 
structure. 

So, we may safely say, began the age-long process of hu- 
manizing this being, the sole and savage possessor of words and 



CONSCIOUS PURPOSE AND BRAIN DEVELOPMENT 89 

self-consciousness. As the sub-human moved on toward the hu- 
man, an impulse to consider somewhat the comfort of others ap- 
peared, a push outward came from within where the soul dwells; 
and tolerance, justice, sympathy, faith and love, the comforting 
effects of these, the value of them to ourselves and others gradually 
made themselves felt in human consciousness. They grew and 
waxed stronger, made their own abiding place in the gray tissues 
and became an integral part of sub-conscious man. What we still 
savage mortals have of these qualities has come from desire and 
will. ]\Ian saw the advantage of such qualities and desired them, 
longed for them and in direct ratio to his desires and prayers they 
have appeared and with them — with each vibration of each one 
— there has been wrought an anatomical change in the body. 

Hitherto our study of the mental self has been to a great 
extent guesswork. We have assumed an hypothesis. We have 
tried to believe in a power within ourselves that would respond 
to every effort, we have tried to believe that if we " ask," we 
" shall receive " ; but doubt has lingered in the minds of those 
who have not succeeded in attaining desired ends. Now, at the 
beginning of this revealing century, we are able to study self 
scientifically, with scientific proof that " all thought is motor, 
that all mental states are followed by bodily activity of some 
sort" (James), and that every effort, thought and emotion modifies 
the anatomy of the brain, which is the central office of all our 
growth; that Personality with a purpose may develop in the brain 
and nervous system a home for attainment of whatsoever kind or 
degree. 

As he comes into the realization that the body is a physical 
apparel, an instrument which is here to serve him, to obey his 
orders with precision, to grow as he decrees, an instrument with a 
brain to develop as he decrees, and that his consciousness will ex- 
pand as he decrees, man is forced to see that he may make or un- 
make his character, his mental aptitudes and capacities, and not 
only make them but make them with the exactitude of a chemical 
compound. He is forced to see that conscious purpose and drill 
are the means by which to thwart depressing, destructive tend- 
encies of mind; for as we construct the brain cells by the extent 
of our mental activity, we also cause them to atrophy by ceasing 
that activity. For instance the impatience that by repetition has 
established a neural path for itself until the mind runs in that 



90 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

path much more easily than in the path of patience, may be dis- 
placed by forming the new center of patience and by practicing 
patience until the undesirable cells have atrophied and the new 
ones are established. So instantaneously does the inner creative 
power respond to call that only the call and persistence in con- 
scious purpose are required to permanently remake and reform 
an unfortunate disposition and character. As man learns that the 
need creates the organism, he is forced to see too that if he will 
take the trouble, he may build a cranial home of character and in- 
tellect where health and happiness reign, and where prosperity 
is as much a matter of course as one's breath and heart-beats. 

Admitting all this to be true, admitting that the will, soul or 
personality is not the unmanageable thing it was once supposed 
to be, admitting the now accepted facts of our ever active under- 
consciousness which we have come to know forms as decidedly 
a part of our being as the heart and stomach, admitting our ability 
to create special aptitudes and functions, to develop brain cells, to 
create brain and nerve fibers at will, how much of human wreck- 
age, physical and ethical, surrounding us now on all sides might 
not be spared future future generations by bring children up from 
babyhood in the knowledge of their sub-conscious existence ! 

To acquaint them with the sub-conscious laboratory in which 
at all times are being established conditions of body and char- 
acter as surely as food is making tissue, and sleep is giving re- 
freshment, is to equip our boys and girls with the materials for 
health, happiness and plenty. Experience, observation and prac- 
tical experiments of the writer during twenty-five years leave in 
her mind no room for doubt that children are more adequately 
armed to meet the problems of existence by training of this nature 
than by any other system with which she is acquainted, because 
it gives them a keen incentive to individual effort, and they take 
a vital interest in the chemist of the hidden laboratory within their 
organism who so carefully obeys their instructions. They listen 
with eagerness, as to a fascinating fairy story, as they are told 
how this faithful chemist will make happiness, and build for them 
the sturdy, well body if they give him such fine materials to work 
with as good will, cheerfulness, integrity, orderliness, patience, 
mercy, justice, reverence and all other good things of mind and 
character. 

Furthermore they become most interested and active scouts 



CONSCIOUS PURPOSE AND BUAIN DEVELOPMENT 91 

in their own behalf when they learn that peevish^ ill-tempered, 
unkind^ disrespectful^ selfish thoughts and deeds are materials 
which this subterranean chemist must use if they are given him 
as he has no power of choice^ and which eventually and inevitably 
must make a suffering body and a personality that will neither 
hold nor attract pleasant playmates. Children reared in this con- 
sciousness also greatly enjoy teaching their mates and are often 
found reminding them of what is sure to take place in the inner 
workshop if they are naughty. 

Methods for child education after it has reached the kinder- 
garten age we have, but little or no attention has been given to 
brain building before the child is born and immediately upon it* 
advent into the world; but as surely as the foundation and key- 
stone to a marble arch are imperative, the beginning of brain- 
building at the beginning is imperative for the immutable founda- 
tion of splendid character and physical health. From embryology 
and psychology we have learned that in the first months of life 
practically only the sub-conscious mind is at work and that during 
the first seven years of its existence, the child is intensely sus- 
ceptible to suggestion in any form and reflects its environment, 
physical, mental and spiritual, with precision. Truth to say for 
the first seven years the child is more sub-conscious than self-con- 
scious. The astuteness of the Jesuit stands out bold and clear in 
his understanding of this fact. " Give me a child the first seven 
jyears of its life, and you may do what you like with him after- 
wards : he will always be a Jesuit," he declares. " Give me the 
child for the first seven years of his life," the student of the 
modern Psychology in command of his mind, emotions and acts 
may say; " and you may do what you like with him after- 
ward: he will always be a commander of circumstances, events and 
conditions physical, mental and spiritual." 

Side by side with sub-conscious training and brain-building 
which can be given as a story as soon as the child can understand 
anything, should stand normally progressive aids to the natural 
and graceful development of such psycho-physiological activities 
as spontaneously come with growth — rising, sitting, standing, 
walking, moving, handling objects, etc., etc., and all harking back 
to the fact that the child himself is doing all this because he 
desires to and has the power to do what he desires. 

With the development of the graceful body, come conscious 



92 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

self-reliance and self-mastery, and the conservation and increase 
of nervous energy which is to be this new being's stock in trade 
in the great business of living. Instead of being thrust into the 
vortex of confused and confusing existence unarmed, with the ad- 
monition " you must be quiet," " you must be good," and later 
" you must be moral because it is right," he is led to experiment 
with the wonder and beauty of stillness in which his faculties 
grow as seeds grow in stillness in the ground, and led to see how 
he may plant, nurture, love and watch the process of developing 
goodness as it becomes a part of all that he does and honeycombs 
itself into the brain, making him an all round being of health and 
power and because of his own work. 

It is evident that we must begin the education for the child, 
youth and man of health, sound nerves, integrity, power, peace, 
harmony and success by educating ourselves to higher standards of 
morality. By technique and drill in self-discipline, we, the 
teachers, parents, models, must rid ourselves, of such sub-human 
proclivities as fear, jealousy, envy, false pride, unkind criticism, 
hatred, greed and other equally trouble-causing and sub-moral 
qualities of character. We must uninterruptedly express the dis- 
position and general man-worthiness we hope to see prevail as 
permanent disposition and character in the arriving man and 
woman. We who would be helpers must become moral ourselves, 
not only obey the ritual of morality, but become moral " in spirit 
and in truth," and by the subtle silent influence of a self-made 
character of poise, serenity, confidence and awareness of inner 
power, entice the sub-conscious soul of the child up into a moral 
and spiritual consciousness that in later life will not require re- 
generation. 

All along down the ages prophetic souls have sought to inspire 
men and women with a recognition of these possibilities. We have 
had ears, but until to-day we have not heard. There is no reason 
to believe that the scientific knowledge of brain cell development 
was a part of the intellectual equipment of the author of Solomon's 
songs; but with the intuitive wisdom of those who yield themselves 
in meditation to the inflow of what Emerson calls " the waves of 
God," he preceded our modern scientists by many thousand years 
in the conclusion that we make our own mental, moral and physical 
conditions by our thinking. " As a man thinketh in his heart, so 
is he," he asserts. In this declaration, the poet practically states 



DIRECT TEACHING THROUGH BIOGRAPHY 93 

the biological law THE NEED CREATES THE ORGANISM. 
He " who walketh in Galilee " declared all that he himself did 
to be possible to us and " greater things." Modern science shows 
the way to that " event toward which all creation moves." The 
goal of perfection established for us by the majestic Nazarene is 
no longer a vague ideal but an arriving condition for which we 
may set sail with conscious purpose and with the assurance that 
our efforts in the way of ethical stability, moral usefulness and 
spiritual enlightenment are making physical homes for themselves 
in the brain; aware that science has shown us the process by which 
we one and all may follow the injunction of St. Paul: " Be ye 
transformed by the renewing of the mind." 



THE DIRECT TEACHING OF MORALS THROUGH THE 
BIOGRAPHICAL ELEMENT IN LITERATURE 

Charity Dye 

The use of the biographical element in moral education is not 
so much a matter of teaching as it is one of being taught by a con- 
crete embodiment of the attributes of character to which one would 
attain. It is not so much a matter of literature as it is one of life, 
though like the great body of literature from which it is taken, this 
element is rich in what delights, uplifts, gives solace and causes 
the soul to grow. The biographical element is personal and for 
this reason is eminently suitable as a means of awakening interest 
in life. Its high light of example illuminates the mind till it sees 
relations. The intimacy between reader and author brings about 
new understandings and causes the contagion of good will and 
good feeling to become active, so that the reader shares in the great 
deed that will by and by make him ready for his great moment. 
The biographical element can furnish to the most isolated person 
a companionship that develops his social imagination till he comes 
to feel himself a citizen of the world past and present, able to re- 
joice in good fortune, feel pity for sorrow and grow to be an active 
force in the upbuilding of the nation. 

There is no part of education with which the biographical ele- 
ment is not connected. It makes us see the earth as our home 



94 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

through the lives of those who planted the flag or the Cross, blazed 
the trail, or pieced out the fringes of the continents through noble 
daring and persistent eiFort. The stories of discovery and explora- 
tion furnish some of the finest examples of heroism, physical en- 
durance and faithfulness to duty to be found in the whole range of 
literature. The accounts of Columbus, Magellan, Cook, Living- 
stone and Stanley make the unheroic life seem cheap. The sacred 
spots on this earth are those associated with human life and thoughts 
We make pilgrimages in our own country and cross the sea, that 
we may stand by a grave, visit a tomb or a statue, or see the humble 
home of a person who dared to be himself and speak God's word 
as it came to him. Wordsworth, as Nature's priest in " The Pre- 
lude," shows us how the young soul may find itself through contact 
with all natural sights and sounds, the round world and living air. 
Richard Jeffries, in " The Story of My Heart," leads us into his 
own personal experiences and gives us an insight into the way that 
Nature took hold of his being. The lives of Bryant, Thoreau, Bur- 
roughs, Emerson and Whitman cause in us a fuller appreciation 
of the sweet influences of our surroundings and help us to see an 
analogy between the laws of matter and of mind. 

History is best learned through the makers of it. Carlyle 
thought the best history of the Civil War in England was the 
biography of Oliver Cromwell, and our own Lowell confessed that 
his knowledge of history had been learned through biography and 
not through record books. Lincoln, Bismarck, William the Silent, 
Mazzini, Pericles, and Hampden only head the list that every child 
should know. The heroes of peace are now to be brought forward 
alongside the heroes of war. Those who have helped the world by 
invention; those who have given their lives to fight disease, who have 
cleaned up cities as did Colonel Waring of New York; those who 
have championed the cause of little children, are all enlarging our 
notions of country and patriotism, and we are coming to feel that 
the fireside should receive the consideration that was once given 
to the frontier. In this connection we should not forget to honor 
such men as Dr. Grenfell, missionary to the deep-sea fishermen; 
Baroness von Suttner, author of " Lay Down Your Arms " ; Julia 
Ward Howe; George William Curtis, champion of civil service re- 
form; Florence Nightingale and Clara Barton; and for patriotism 
there stands before the mind a great cloud of witnesses made up 
not only of great generals and statesmen, but also of the faithful 



DIRECT TEACHING THROUGH BIOGRAPHY 95 

rank and file. We are coming to see with Ruskin that the " veins 
of wealth are purple " and laid through the whole social structure 
in the lives of all who have learned to " speak plain the word 
country," to place public welfare above political prejudices; to 
live sacrificial lives in lifting up the common average and making 
democracy more than a name. The olive wreath is to take the 
place of the sword as a symbol of civilization. 

A splendid example of the use of the psychological moment in 
the teaching of patriotism is shown when in the tragedy of the 
Titanic, Captain Smith's order to his men, " Be British ! " flashed 
into the heart of the world. The mind was then ripe and the occa- 
sion ready to understand the dying words of Richard Grenville in 
" The Revenge," and the obedience in " The Charge of the Light 
Brigade," and " The Heavy Brigade," and the character of the 
Duke of Wellington, who taught the world that 

*' In all lands and in all human story 
The path of duty is the way to glory." 

The biographical element that sets forth achievement is one 
of the most forceful ways of teaching morals and creates reverence 
for life. Actual achievement finds answer in the heart of youth, 
and through it new standards are formed, new ideals conceived, and 
oftentimes the purpose of life is revealed or fixed so that it acts 
and reacts as an informing power, until one is able, because of it, 
to put off" a present pleasure for a future good. The biography of 
achievement has largely to do with men and women who have dig- 
nified life by the use made of their work-time and their leisure and 
their power in the management of afi"airs. Parton expresses pity 
for the young man who could read even the briefest account of 
what has been done in manufacturing towns by such men as John 
Smedley and Robert Owen, without being touched or without form- 
ing a secret resolve to do something similar if ever he should vrin 
opportunity. He calls such men the " natural chiefs of industrial 
communities ; the successors of the feudal lords of another and 
earlier time." One entry from the journal of Elihu Barrett, the 
learned blacksmith, shows what can be done by one who has found 
out the value of time and knows how to use it: 

" Monday, June 18, 1838, headache, 30 pages of Cuvier's ' Theory of the 
Earth,' 64 pages of French, 11 hours of forging," 



96 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

and there are other entries showing still greater achievement during 
a period of many years. In this group come also the great philan- 
thropists of every age^ those who counted it the highest privilege in 
their conception to give opportunities to others and to plead for 
the doctrine of universal brotherhood. Such persons as Peter 
Cooper and Ezra Cornell, Arnold Toynbee and Jane Addams, belong 
to this class. 

The biography of achievement also seeks to discover the human 
interest attached to the life about us, by finding out persons whose 
service to the world has been in a measure overlooked or lost out, 
and whose names when spoken are used by us unconscious of their 
connection with objects, with local land-marks, with implements of 
labor, and the processes in the arts and sciences with which they 
worked. For example, do you suppose anyone ever stops to think 
of the interesting life-story of McCormick, whose reaper harvests 
our grain ? Or, when seeing the sign " Pasteurized Milk " upon the 
dairy wagon, of the man who made that possible? Or of Volta in 
connection with the measurement of electricity? Or of William 
Morris, designer of the chair in which we take our comfort? Or 
of MacAdam, whose name is stamped upon our country roads ? Of 
Maydole, the maker of the best hammer? Of all the names of 
streams and counties and towns in one's environment? They are 
all replete with human interest. 

It is from Plutarch's forty-six parallel lives of Greeks and 
Romans conspicuous in public life during some seven centuries that 
we get glimpses of the home and the market place and have our 
wills strengthened when they grow sluggish. The tap-root stories 
of all nations hand on the special message of the people from which 
they sprang. The Hebrews expressed life in the terms of right- 
eousness; from their prophets we feel the inspiration of great lives 
giving a great message, and fall under the spell of the life of Saint 
Paul, whose story is one of the most powerful in Jewish history. 
The Greek expressed life in the terms of beauty or artistic restraint. 
From them we hear Socrates discoursing on death in his prison ; see 
Prometheus (their divine man) chained to the rock; marvel at the 
words of Antigone about the " unwritten laws of God " ; are stimu- 
lated by the modernness of Hercules in his civic labors; and pay 
honor to the heroes of Marathon. The Norsemen expressed life in 
the terms of valor; their Baldur, and Thor, and Sigurd the Vol- 
sung all show us that the true hero in their conception never turned 



DIRECT TEACHING THUOUGH BIOGRAPHY 97 

his back, never was afraid, never broke his word, and divided fair. 
In the stories from mediaeval romance we have life expressed in 
the terms of chivalry or honor. There are Arthur and his court of 
the Round Table; there are Spenser's Una for highest purity, the 
Red Cross Knight for bravery, and Britomart for chastity. These 
are all said to be biographies in which the exploits of the heroes 
are the greatest conceptions of the greatest men living in the times 
of which the stories tell. 

The biographical element used by the story-teller places him 
in very close relation to the biographer proper. Both furnish ideals 
to the reader and bring lessons home to him. The biographer is 
said to " deal with fundamental facts ; the story-writer with fiction 
to teach fundamental truths." The biographer gives us the story 
of a life; the fiction writer its philosophy. Every one feels the 
air of reality surrounding the characters in good fiction. From the 
pages of Eliot, Scott, Dickens, Bulwer, Tolstoi, Browning and Hugo, 
we are furnished with instruction in all the elements of refined life. 
There is Mrs. Amos Barton, the perfect wife and mother; Colonel 
Newcom, the perfect gentleman; Mrs. Caxton, a model of politeness 
in the way she listened as if you alone spoke the word she wished 
to hear. Dina Morris and Dolly Winthrop are real preachers of 
the true gospel of goodness. For childish insight and imagination, 
there is Sissy Jupe who lights up the world of hard, prosaic 
Gradgrinds ; and in the same company we place Pippa with her 
songs, changing the hearts of all who hear them, Balaustion, the 
Greek maiden, Hugo's Cossette, and Lamb's Barbara S. Then 
there are the Jewess Rebecca, the splendid knight Ivanhoe, Jeanie 
Deans in her interview with Queen Caroline, Ellen Douglas and Fitz 
James. For fidelity in friendship we are shown old man Pegotty, 
and Sidney Carton. We are taught the power of forgiveness in 
Lowell's " Yussouf " who put to death his thought of murder and 
sent away the murderer of his only son, with gifts. From Tolstoi's 
" The Long Exile " and Browning's " Pompilia " we also learn for- 
giveness. Jean Val Jean is placed by himself as a moral hero. 
The informing power of an ideal upon a life is shown in Haw- 
thorne's " The Great Stone Face." Ernest came to resemble the 
face because he looked at it and thought upon the attributes of 
character back of it, and the thought shaped the man. It is full 
of meaning, too, that the poet, the true seer, was the first person 
to show the likeness between the face of Ernest and that on the 



98 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

mountainside. The character-destroying effects of procrastination 
are shown in Henry James's " The Madonna of the Future." Van 
Dyke's " The Other Wise Man " tells us to heed the calls of mercy 
by the way, even though we are late at the gathering. The power 
of love abounds in " Abou Ben Adhem/' and of unselfishness in 
Mrs. Browning's " My Kate." Nowhere is the working out of a 
child's punishment shown more to advantage than in the story of 
the broken flower-pot in Bulwer's " The Caxtons." Stevenson's 
" Will o' the Mill " warns us against crushing out the wonderment 
and desire for life-experience felt by young souls, as the man who 
had seen only the glamour and not the true light did for Will. Tol- 
stoi's " How much Land need a Man own " shows the power of 
pride and temptation, and " Master and Man " lays bare the bottom 
facts of soul and enables us to see the miraculous transformation 
whereby the master may change places with the man. Tolstoi's 
voice is the voice of a prophet, and his message is that of brotherly 
love. 

The historical novel comes tmder this class because of the 
made-up conditions employed to give historical personages an air 
of reality. Most of the master novelists have given us noble ex- 
amples of how real characters may be used. Eliot's " Romola " 
is a splendid example of this. 

The biographical element throws light upon every subject on 
the school curriculum. In connection with art study it is helpful 
to know of the patience shown by Saint Gaudens, standing at his 
bench as cameo cutter for five years before he made his great 
statues; of the triumph of will in Benvenuto Cellini's molding of 
his Perseus, and of Barnand Palissy, and of Giotto the shepherd 
lad who afterwards built the great tower of Florence. For the 
student of science there is the story of what Darwin saw on the 
Ship Beagle, and the lives of Agassiz, Audubon, Newton, GaKleo, 
and Edison, all seekers for the truth. 

For music, there are the stories of Beethoven and of Wagner, 
who wrote his great dramas and then composed for them an orches- 
tral setting which has changed the notion of music in the twentieth 
century. For athletics, it is well to read of the Spartan winner 
told of in " Ten boys who Lived on the Road from Long Ago to 
Now." It is a good offset to the professional spirit of these days 
in contrast to the patriotic one then, when men played for honor 
and not for money. 



DIRECT TEACHING THKOUGH BIOGRAPHY 99 

School activities always cluster about some life. There are 
the anniversaries, and occasion days and pageants to teach of men 
and patriotism, and to furnish opportunity for cooperation and the 
spirit of community life and civic duty. These activities also 
create higher interests at school, and table-talk at home, and give 
motive to life. 

Nothing has been said of the biographical element which sets 
forth the villain. One objection sometimes raised against the use 
of biography is that lives are not shown in their true light; that 
faults are glozed over. The moral effect is lost wherever this is so. 
The shortcomings should be honorably acknowledged and used to 
bring out contrasts in the same life, and with other lives, and to set 
forth the imhappy outcome arising from false motives and stand- 
ards. The modern child is hopeless to one who tries to deceive 
him; a student was heard to say in speaking of the plays, " Every- 
man " and " Every Woman," that he knew what every boy wanted, 
— it was " fair play." 

problems: 

The biographical element may be used in the direct method to 
create a new interest in character study and environment by setting 
problems before students. The following illustrations may serve 
to explain what is meant: 

I, CHARACTER STUDY IN MFE AKD BOOKS 

What did this person make out of his situation? Wherein was he 
strong? Wherein weak? Did he help to illumine any lives about him? 
What manifestations of will? of noble emotion? of intellect, did he show? 
Was he capable of sacrifice? What lasting contribution did he make to 
the sum of human good. In what respect is the world better for his life? 
Did you find in him any elements worthy of imitation? 

II. SPECIAL BIOGRAPHY 

Make a "Who's Who" book for your community, for your city, your 
State or your county. Hunt up your own family tree. Arrange a Hall of 
Fame of your own choosing from people of all times. Write your own in'- 
scription under each name. Write a list of persons whose lives have made a 
great impression upon you. How do you account for it? As you read, add 
to this and at the end of six months go over the entire list and see which 
life stands out most strongly. Do you remember interesting another person 
in the lives which interested you? Do you remember how you came to read 
the lives of persons whom you like best? Make out a list of biographies 
that you would recommend to a person of your own age. 

Make a list of five artists whose pictures you like. Write a descriptive 



100 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

paragraph of the artist. Who was Jean Francois Millet? Rosa Bonheur? 
Name five musicians whose compositions you like. Give an incident in the 
life of each one. (This can be multiplied indefinitely.) 



III. ESrVIRONMENT 

Do you know in your environment a street, or park, or an institution, or 
a fountain, or a memorial tablet, or a bridge or fence, named for a person 
of whom you know only the name? Why was it given? Find out the 
character of the one honored. 

What unnamed historic land-mark near you? Do you know of the 
life of the most prominent figure connected with it, for whom you would 
name it? Investigate the person and see if he is worthy of the honor. 

What pioneers connected with the early history of your environment? 
Have you found them worth studying? Make a list. 

Has your interest ever been drawn to the names attached to all the 
things with which one works? Look at the hammer your ftaher uses; the 
pencil with which you write; the speel holding the thread used by your 
mother; find the names and the persons. Who was one of the first clock 
makers in America? Write a sketch of him. 

For whom did you name the trees you planted last Arbor Day? Why? 
Whom have you chosen to honor next Arbor Day? Why? 

The biographical element is simple and convincing, and has 
been the means used, in the history of the race, for teaching truth. 
A Life lived over nineteen hundred years ago has named our civili- 
zation, our churches, and our institutions, and still stimulates men 
to seek the peace that passes understanding. 



ETHICAL VALUES IN HISTORY 
David Saville Muzzey 

HEAD OF HISTORY DEPARTMENT, ETHICAL CULTURE SCHOOL 

" In history," said Emerson, " an idea always overhangs like a 
moon and rules the tide which rises simultaneously in all the souls 
of a generation." This is but the poet's way of saying that history 
in any given age is directly dependent not only for its methods and 
tools but even for its materials and its ideals on the intellectual 
classifications of that age. Humanity seems to tackle its problems 
one at a time, if we take a comprehensive view of the centuries, and 



ETHICAL VALUES IN HISTORY 101 

each problem, moreover, seems to reduce itself to one of amalgama- 
tion. The Oriental spirit and the Greek are fused in a mighty 
fermentation lasting five hundred years ; so the Greek spirit and the 
Roman, the Roman and the German, the pagan and the Christian, 
the imperial and the feudal, the feudal and the communal, the 
agrarian and the artisan, the burgeois and the proletarian — to 
mention only a few of the more obvious of these great adjusting 
processes in which humanity, like the fabled Enceladus, seems to 
shift from side to side beneath its burden to get a few aeon- 
moments of repose. He will read history poorly who does not be- 
come aware of the truth of its variety and multiformity of purpose, 
who is not responsive, as he reads of any epoch, to the particular 
kind of development men were interested in furthering in that 
epoch by searching and recording the annals of the past for the 
instruction of the present and the future. Augustine and Orosius 
are intelligible only as the prophets of the destruction of the sin- 
stained city of earth (the civitas terrena) and the compensative 
apocalypse of the splendid eternal city of God (the civitas Dei)^ 
Gregory of Tours and the Venerable Bede can be understood only by 
a mind that has dwelt in the cloistered scriptorium of a monastery. 
The Magdeburg Centuriators and Melanchthon speak only to those 
who have entered the great arena of confessional warfare which 
filled Europe with its distressing tumult during the 16th and 17th 
centuries. Gibbon and Voltaire used the intellectual concepts of the 
18th century Aufklaerung, or lUuminism, and must be read through 
these concepts. Carlyle and Guizot are children of the awakened 
humanitarianism of the early 19th century which colors their inter- 
pretations even of Frederick the Great's and Louis 14th's despotism. 
" In history an idea always overhangs like a moon and rules the 
tide which rises simultaneously in all the souls of a generation." 

What is the idea which overhangs like a moon in our generation ? 
In answering that question, we shall have determined what are the 
ethical values in history for us ; for those ethical values are nothing 
more or less than the ideals which rule each generation with their 
silent resistless lunar beckonings. To hold one moment longer to 
Emerson's astronomical simile, we shall have to substitute for the 
moon a double star. For it is rather the twin forces of Science and 
Democracy which govern the tides of human action in our generation. 

That we live in a scientific age is an obvious truism; yet so 
prone are we in our intellectual complacency to let acquiescence in 



102 SECOND INTERNATIONAI, MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

a general truth excuse us from careful application of that truth to 
the minutest details of our study that we do not vitalize our study 
by making it a vehicle for the truth apprehended by our age. We 
echo the phrase, " a scientific age/' and it means to most people 
probably only that electricity and radium and the aeroplane are ' 
making possible for the present generation of men such deeds as 
would make them look like wizards to their resuscitated grand- 
fathers ; or that the biological history of the race of animals and 
men, which has succeeded the old epic of men and gods, is a contin- 
uous narrative since Darwin's day and not a collection of unrelated 
short stories; or that we must be careful now in historical and lit- 
erary study to sift our evidence, criticise our sources, and resolutely 
resist the insidious temptation to compose pleasing narratives of 
what might have been so. This is all very truly a result of the pro- 
gressive scientific spirit of our century, and a result so clearly before 
the face and eyes of all to-day that even the busiest man who runs 
may read it. Yet it is only the beginning of the appreciation of 
what the scientific spirit means in any branch of study, and in such 
a royal branch of study as history this oft-repeated insistence on 
sifted sources and unpartisan interpretation, this respect for con- 
tinuity, this wise balance of material and spiritual forces, are but 
general counsels for the guidance of the student. The deep and 
intimate influence of the scientific spirit of our age on history is an 
ethical influence, reaching our very conception of the scope and pur- 
pose of history. It is much more than an improvement in the tools 
of our craft and an added skill in the handling of them. It is a 
change in the pattern of our progress. 

In the first place, and most obviously, science has added vast 
domains to the realm of human knowledge, and has widened the cur- 
riculum of the human mind so that it runs far back beyond Homer 
and Abraham, and far out beyond the beaten Aristotelian track of 
the Middle Ages. The very fact of the extension of the field of 
knowledge brings with it the constant question of re-adjustment. 
What part shall each discipline play in the organization of that 
knowledge into an efficient education.'' In the late Roman Republic 
the study of literature and oratory sufficed to make a man sufficient 
unto his day ; in the high Middle Ages the study of scholastic philos- 
ophy made him a torch-bearer in civilization; the Rennaisance de- 
manded an appreciation of harmonies other than logical; the 17th 
and 18th centuries strove to build up a perfect man by analyzing 



ETHICAL, VALUES IN HISTORY 103 

the soul within him; the 19th and 20th centuries seemed to have 
their chief task in building up a society in which man shall be 
ethically efficient only as he finds his true relation to the people 
around him. These are only rough generalizations^ but they are 
true to their purpose, which is to suggest the ethical readjustment 
always involved in the alteration of the ideals of humanity, brought 
about by the widening of the field of human knowledge through sci- 
entific acquisitions. 

A second way in which the scientific spirit exerts an ethical 
influence on history is by its intensely practical nature. Modern 
science is not only enamored of truth (the scholastic theology of 
St. Thomas Aquinas and of Albertus Magnus was that, also) but it 
is devoted to facts. It might paraphrase Demosthenes' famous pre- 
scription for oratory in its prescription for truth: first data, and 
again data, and finally data. The moral influence of this Empiricism 
on historical study and interpretation is seen immediately, of course, 
in its veto of rhetorical license and ingenious reconstructions in 
historical narrative. We cannot any longer tolerate speeches com- 
posed by the historian and put into the mouths of his heroes, nor even 
a Gibbon's majestic and euphuistic compositions and reconciliations 
of discrepant sources. But the scientific occupation with facts goes 
deeper in its influence on history than the mere condemnation of 
imaginative excesses in narrative. It subjects the whole question of 
the preservation of the past in records to the searching question, 
cui bono. What are the uses of history? Science is reading ever 
more clearly in its records a splendid story — the story of the 
growth of a world out of star-mist, of the growth of a man out of 
a protoplasm, of the growth of a mind out of a sentient stirring, of 
the adjustment of life to its habitat, of the domination and control 
of natural forces by human intelligence. And reading these things 
in the book of nature, science turns to her sister study of history 
and asks, What are you reading in the book of man ? 

All moral stimulus comes from a challenge. It is a matter for 
congratulation (though it fills some timid souls with dismay, as a 
challenge always does) that every subject of our curriculum is being 
called to face that question of practical application to-day. The 
domain of the student was once a green field of refuge from the 
world. The cloistered exclusion and seclusion of the Middle Ages 
clung to the idea of education. Scholars shut themselves up to live 
with datives and ablatives. But the time for the " grammarian's 



104 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

funeral " has come in education. It is not only the Greek depart- 
ment that is hearing the challenge. Mathematics and lif e^ languages 
and life, literature and life, history and life, are the topics we hear 
discussed at the pedagogical conferences. This summons, then, of 
history, along with the other subjects of our curriculum, to the bar 
of the judgment of practicability, of usability, is the second great 
moral influence that the scientific spirit of our age has had on the 
study of history. 

Of the import of the doctrine of evolution for the study of 
history I need hardly to speak. It is obvious that the conception of 
the continuity of history, of the interpretation of man's social and 
j>olitical life as a long process of development from savagery to 
civilization, or to use Spencerian language, from the rude homo- 
geneity of brutedom to the cultured heterogeneity of brotherhood, is 
a direct corollary of the scientific idea of a mounting series of bio- 
logical forms in an unbroken process of evolution. Before the 
application of this principle history was only a collection of in- 
stances. Some of these instances could be very well used for moral 
instruction and warning. These were the ethical values in history, 
but the ethical value of history as a whole was not apparent. We 
have to thank science that it forces us to do for our historical data 
what it does for its empirical data, viz., to order them into more and 
more comprehensive general concepts, build them into a system, 
provide them with a purport — in a word, make them ethical. 

And here we must leave the subject of the moral influence on 
history of the scientific spirit of our age and turn to the second of 
the great influences that are ruling the tides of thought in our gen- 
eration, namely, democracy, and inquire briefly what import it has 
for our ethical conception of history. 

The progress of democracy is, of course, itself a part of our 
historical narrative in a much more intimate sense than the progress 
of science. For democracy expresses itself inevitably and directly 
in political changes ; and politics, if not the whole of history, as 
Freeman maintained, is at least a considerable part of it. But it 
is not merely the democratic incidents in history (revolutions, con- 
stitution-building, the nucleating of nations, the disintegration of 
various forms of political, ecclesiastical, feudal, or economic 
tyranny) that I refer to in speaking of the influence of democracy 
on history. Democracy has become so conscious of itself and its 
mission in our century that it, like science, demands recognition not 



ETHICAL VALUES IN HISTORY 105 

as an event in evolution, but as a principle of interpretation. This 
pressure of the time explains why we find historians like Green, 
Michelet and McMaster writing in their prefaces that they intend 
to tell the history of the people, their industries, and occupations, 
their art and religion, their literature, their dress, even, and their 
amusements. The social perspective is widening every century. 
Once only kings and nobles and high churchmen came within the 
perview of the historian. Then the artisan and the trader and the 
banker broke into the society of kings and dukes. Now the day 
laborer, the tramp, and the pauper are on the historian's canvas too. 
No state of humanity that does not contribute its part to the interpre- 
tation of the whole. No factor too insignificant in the close network 
of economic and moral interests which our modern civilization is 
weaving to find its recognition as a thread in the warp. 

The effect of this enlargement of the frame of history to include 
wider and wider categories is distinctly an ethical process. For is it 
not true that ethical progress may be defined as a constant readjust- 
ment, both of our own sympathies and of social institutions to take 
in once-ignored or despised factors ; a new accustoming of ourselves 
(to come to the literal meaning of " Ethos ") to a more adequate 
brotherhood? This conception of ethics has in it an illuminating 
truth for the study of history. The imperfect forms of society in 
the past and the present, whether bestial or brutish or tyrannous or 
factious, whether patriarchic or tribal, or obsequious or oligarchic, 
have all had their faults in their failure to see mankind as a great 
whole, or their unwillingness to integrate the concerns of men as a 
brotherhood. Some portion of mankind have been left out as 
strangers, pariahs, barbarians, slaves, serfs, commoners, proletarians. 
And the ethics corresponding to each form of society has at once re- 
vealed and sanctioned the imperfections of that society. 

To illustrate by a few historical examples. The civilization of 
China has for its basis reverence for ancestors. The religious rites 
and educational ideals of China derive from parental authority, and 
are directed toward the attainment of complete filial fidelity. The 
unpardonable sin, therefore, in the eyes of the true Celestial, is 
impiety in its literal sense — lack of reverence for the departed 
elders. The Chinaman is compassed about by a great throng of 
ancestors in whose endorsement of his life and worship he finds ful- 
fillment of his highest aspirations. 

In the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome the omnip- 



106 SECOND INTERNATIONAL, MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

otence of the city-state was the guiding political idea. The indi- 
vidual was nothing except as he was a citizen. Exile was a mild 
death sentence. Slavery was the logical fate of the captured 
prisoner. The city had its own gods, its sacred oracles, temples, 
and groves. Devotion to the altars of the fatherland was the su- 
preme religious duty of the citizens of the ancient state. Refusal 
to oifer a pinch of snufF on the Roman altar was a mortal offense, 
because it was a denial of the protective power of the city's guardian 
divinity. The " atheism " for which Socrates was put to death by 
the Athenians was not the denial of the divinities in general, but the 
refusal to worship the divinities which the city worshipped. The 
entire ethical import of ancient history may be summed up in the one 
word. Patriotism. For all Greek and Roman virtue was cast in the 
mold of devotion to the state. 

The mediaeval-feudal form of society was based on allegiance 
to a person; pope, emperor, king, bishop, or lay-lord. The ethics 
of this society is summed up in the word, homage, or man-devotion. 
It is an extremely suggestive fact that Dante, the great seer of the 
Middle Ages, in whose " Divine Comedy " the ethics of the centuries 
from Charlemagne to St. Thomas Aquinas is enshrined, punishes the 
betrayal of one's liege-lord in the deepest circle of hell. The last 
of Dante's wretches, embedded in the relentless ice that freezes and 
burns them forever, are Brutus, who struck down his master Cgesar, 
and Judas, who betrayed his master Christ. 

The great European monarchies which consolidated in the 15th, 
16th, and 17th centuries, depended on the principle of nationality 
for their stability and power. The ethical complement of the 
national monarch was the national religion. Parliaments and 
councils busied themselves drawing up creeds for the nations. The 
great offense, in the eyes of the authorities, was heresy, which di- 
vided the country's strength and sapped it in religious war. Hence 
the " thorough " policy of the Stuart ministers Strafford and Arch- 
bishop Laud. Hence the Augsburg and Helvetic confessions, hence 
the Synods of Dort and Westminster, and hence St. Bartholomew's 
night and the dragonades of Louis XIV. 

Now our modern democracy is founded on a much broader 
basis than any of these societies of the past. It is built on the 
principles of the English Bill of Rights, the French Declaration of 
the Rights of Man, the American Declaration of Independence. 
However far from realizations in actual society these principles are. 



ETHICAL VALUES IN HISTORY 107 

however frequently we have relapsed into the old narrowness and 
tyranny of atavism^ imperialism and feudalism ; yet the ideal of the 
perfect democracy is before us as it has not been before any genera- 
tion previous in the world's history. It is there like a pillar of light, 
distorted often, shattered into a thousand colored rays at times, but 
still reappearing and beckoning us to the promised land. As this 
splendid ideal of a perfect democracy grows toward fulfillment, 
there grows with it a new historical sense, a new historical ethics, to 
fit the ideal. Not ancestor-worship, not devotion to the altars of 
the state, nor allegiance to a powerful patron, nor subscription to a 
national confession is the ethical demand of democracy, but rather 
the progressive discovery and nurture of the moral nature in man, 
the justification of a confidence in the appeal of the leaders of public 
opinion and social action to a rational and responsible generation. 
It is a slow process ; it is a mighty task. The timid and impatient 
often find the strain too great. Their faith sags under it, and they 
flee to the refuge of precarious certainties in authorities tried and 
found wanting. The strong, however, realize that humanity, though 
it may stagger and faint by the way, has never deliberately turned 
back and never will deliberately turn back to embrace gods which it 
has once learned to mistrust. The moral complement of tyranny in 
any form is obedience. Kings and popes thrive in the atmosphere 
of submission. The moral complement of a free democracy is 
development. Republics live by the virtue of their citizens. 

History, then, under this inspiring conception, becomes invested 
with wonderful dignity and importance. The topics over which the 
metaphysicians of history have disputed seem to us trivial. The 
question. Is history a science?, is a subject of endless debate. But 
how insignificant it appears when we realize that the only historian 
who can write for the education of this present age must be a 
scientific man. Are men or forces the things to be emphasized in 
history?, is a question over which there is grave dispute. The anti- 
thesis seems ridiculous when one has realized the truth that history 
is a progress toward democracy. The men and the forces become 
identical then, the forces are the men and the men are the forces — 
for both are aspects of the great idea that rules the age. 

And so I would define history, to bring out its ethical value, 
as the record of the progressive attainment of an ideal in society. 
Mere masses of men do not make us history. The hundreds of gen- 
erations of savage tribes in Africa or the millions of human beings 



108 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

living about the edge of the Yellow Sea are born and eat and sleep 
and reproduce their kind and die unrecorded. Mere action does not 
make history, else the restless tribes of aboriginal savages would 
claim our attentive study. Mere exercise of power over men or 
nations does not make history in the highest sense, but is rather 
often only a dramatic interruption of history, like the bloody As- 
syrians' campaign to the Mediterranean, or Napoleon's decade of 
military despotism. We must have power acting on people for the 
accomplishment of an ideal to give us real history, and when we 
have that we have ipso facto ethical values. In other words, the 
ideal and not the event is the heart of history. The event is only 
the effort, sometimes successful as at Marathon and Yorktown, 
sometimes temporally defeated as at Evesham and St. Bartholo- 
mew's, to realize in the institutions of the land the ideal for which 
a man or a million will die. Sometimes the ideal has realized itself 
in a sudden shock and crisis, as in the contest between Greece and 
Persia, or in the militant sweep of Mohammedanism along the 
southern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. At other times, it has 
been by a slow process, a gradual sepsis of the higher ideal through 
the strata of society, like the infiltration of the arts and letters, the 
philosophy and culture of the East into the Roman Republic and 
Empire; or the advance of Christianity in twelve centuries from the 
shores of the Aegean to the shores of the Baltic. It matters not 
whether the process is fast or slow. It matters only that the ideal 
is valid and vivid. 

The implications of this ideal conception of history for the inter- 
pretation of the life of the past are tremendous. This conception, 
in the first place, ennobles history and makes its true votaries seers 
not clerks. If history is the form in which the ideal is clothed, 
it can no longer be the handmaiden of literature or theology. Mere 
repetitions of events, like sunrises, crop-ripenings, the floods of the 
Nile, and the generations of Ethiopians do not concern us. Into 
our conception of history the intelligent activity of man must always 
enter. The sciences deal with particulars only as they are aspects 
of general laws. History deals always and ever with particulars 
in themselves. In history the opposite of the individual is only a 
community of individuals, while in science the opposite of the par- 
ticular is not the collection of particulars, but the general law which 
the particular phenomenon obeys. History could be no kind of 
science, therefore, except a psychological science, which, like 



ETHICAL VALUES IN HISTOKY 109 

Cassius, " looks right through the deeds of men." History is too 
active and restless to become a science. A human person can never 
be a cause in the metaphysical sense of the word. He is always an 
agent. He is always undiscoverable in the analysis of one or of a 
million of his fellows. In history, to speak in scientific language, 
the particular is never recognizable in the general or by the general, 
but always remains uncategorized. 

Thus as history has its ethical primacy restored to it by its 
vindication as a great net-work of human will relations, it is deliv- 
ered from the fate to which writers Lacombe and Lamprecht would 
condemn it, of being only the expression of man's reactions under 
the material stimuli of climate, food-supply, types of industry, prox- 
imity of neighbors, and the like. For long years the study of eco- 
nomics was cursed by the so-called " economic man " — an hypo- 
thetical person who, it was assumed, must act so and so under such 
and such conditions of production, exchange, and distribution. The 
materialistic school of history seems to be reviving that spectre 
which economics has finally laid. 

Another consequence of the conception of history as the embod- 
iment of an ideal is that its mission as a chronicle is entirely swal- 
lowed up in its mission as an interpretation. It is not kings and 
dynasties, campaigns and statutes that we have to study primarily 
but problems ; and problems are history in the making. Unless the 
historian can find the moral problem in the event of the past, he is 
dealing only with dry bones. Interpretation is the prophetic breath 
that makes them stir and live and rise like the bones in the valley 
which rose at the prophet Ezekiel's voice, clothed in flesh and 
sinews. And because the work of interpretation is endless, begin- 
ning anew for each generation, speaking the language of each new 
generation, working under the controlling moral idea of each gen- 
eration, the work of history is endless. No part of human history 
has been finally written, even of those great epochs in which we 
receive no new materials for composition, or almost none. The 
idea of there being a fixed unwasting body of history, above and 
exempt from human vicissitudes, is a remnant of the metaphysical 
conception of history as a philosophical construction rather than a 
human process. Schiller wrote, on his assumption of the professor- 
ship of World History at Jena, in 1789, " Man changes and leaves 
the stage; his thoughts and aspirations change and depart with him. 
History alone remains undisturbed on the scene. Like the Homeric 



110 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

Zeus^ she looks down with calm indifference on the struggling or 
the peaceful peoples below." Now for the present generation, 
there is no such detached absolute and statuesque thing by the name 
of History. So far from history's remaining unchanged upon the 
scene when man changes and his ideals are reformed, these very 
changes and reforms are the whole drama of history. History is 
no machine-god hidden in the flies above the stage. It is the play 
itself. 

And the final suggestion that I would make as a result of the 
conception of history as the embodiment of the ideal at any epoch 
struggling to express itself in the institutions of society, is that the 
extent of history will always be co-terminus with the extent of the 
social perspective. It is necessary to ask of every epoch of histori- 
cal writing, not only what thoughts and deeds it is recording, as 
indicative of the moral idea dominating the epoch, but also of what 
people it is recording the thoughts and deeds. We deplore the fact, 
for example, that people are reading trash to-day, whereas in the 
time of Dante they read the lives of the saints and manuals of devo- 
tion. We forget, perhaps, that only an infinitesimal percentage of 
the people read anything at all in the days of Dante, while prac- 
tically everybody reads something or other to-day. We have no 
reason to believe that the average man of the 13th century would 
have thrown into the corner one of our popular magazines to 
take down the Summa of St. Thomas Aquinas from his shelves, had 
he had the choice between the two. And we are probably right if 
we suppose that more people in proportion to the total population 
are reading sober and edifying books to-day than ever before. We 
make the mistake of comparing the activity of a small group in one 
generation with that of a large group in another. We must bring 
into all our judgment of the chaotic society of our own day this 
corrective, namely, that democracy has widened the social perspec- 
tive immeasurably, and our little moral yardsticks fail often to span 
it at all points. We are developing new standards of moral judg- 
ment in our grapple with the flood of problems that democracy has 
let in upon us. How our idea of sin, for example, has changed 
since the days of the Puritans, Professor Ross shows us vividly in 
his well-known books. In his work on Social Control, he discusses 
the grounds, the means, and the system of a social machinery for 
producing the obedience of the individual to the will of the group, 
and finds the greatest instrument for this consummation in our 



ETHICAL VALUES IN HISTORY 111 

schools. Professor Lester Ward^ in his " Dynamic Sociology " calls 
for an art of society, the scientific direction of social forces. He 
would have an academy of social science for the control of our de- 
mocracy,, to correspond to the academies of polytechnic science. He 
looks for what he calls a " collective telesis " — a conscious direction 
of society to its best ends. Again he calls it a " sociocracy " or rule 
of the people conscious of a purpose. This is the kind of thought 
that the democratic process in the last century has engendered. Do 
we suppose that history can continue to be absorbed in Assur- 
banipal's Campaigns or Henry VIII's wives after this? Can we 
suppose that the subject to which the scientific democracy of our 
age looks for its examples and its inspiration is going to be content 
to work only with paleography, diplomatics, and metaphysics for its 
tools and not rather with economics, sociology, ethics, in a word, 
with the sciences relating to the education of mankind as a social 
being ? 

History is an ethical discipline to-day because humanity has 
advanced to the point where the non-ethical interpretations of the 
past have ceased to interest the best spirit. The long annals of 
cruel bloodshed, whose gruesome details used to fill even the text- 
books of school children are no longer thought the best legacy of 
the past. The details of the lives of kings, queens, and nobles 
satisfy only a rather vulgar curiosity. Other questions are absorb- 
ing us now. The life of the many concerns us rather than the 
luxury of the few. For we know that the very life of our civiliza- 
tion depends on our finding easement for the obscure pressure of 
economic want, and enlightenment for the masses whom we have 
elected into full membership in society by our enthusiastic pledges 
to democracy. History, like every discipline that holds its place of 
honor in our society, must furnish its help to the solution of real 
problems. Herein lies the ethical value of history — and herein 
lies its only value. 



lis SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

VISUAL INSTRUCTION IN MORALS 
Milton Fairchild ^ 

In this plan, the lesson-material for moral instruction con- 
sists of photographs of things that actually happen in real life. 
Lantern slides from these, fifty to seventy-five for each lesson, are 
projected on a screen and thus enlarged to life size before audi- 
ences of pupils in the school assembly halls. While the pupils are 
studying these upon the screens, careful instruction in what is 
right and fine in conduct is given from a prepared text in explana- 
tion of the various photographs. To fix the ideals permanently 
in mind, the illustrated lessons are then discussed between teachers 
and pupils in the classrooms. 

The pictures portray common things or incidents which the 
children see around them and which they need to understand from 
the standpoint of morality. In the lesson on sportsmanship, for 
example, photographs of foul play, of disputes and brutality are 
contrasted with the honesty, courtesy and skill shown by true 
sportsmen in other actual games. 

1 Editorial Note. — The author of this article has been engaged for the 
past fifteen years upon the scheme here presented. In order to get his 
photographs, he found it necessary to devise a camera which would allow 
him to take pictures in rapid succession, and which would be inconspicuous 
enough to permit him to stand unobserved among those whom he might 
wish to study. This camera, shaped like a small suit case can take thirty- 
six pictures on glass plates in a minute. A collection of about five thousand 
negatives has been made from incidents which have actually taken place on 
streets and playgrounds, in homes and factories. A gift of ten thousand 
dollars by Mr. Bernard N. Baker of Baltimore has already been used in 
this work, and it is proposed to raise an endowment which will allow a 
corps of specialists to devote their entire time to work of this and allied 
nature. To further Mr. Fairchild's efforts, an organization, known as The 
National Institution for Moral Instruction, was incorporated, consisting of 
the following directors: Bernard N. Baker, Edward F. Buchner, Professor 
Education, Johns Hopkins University; Nathaniel Butler, Professor Educa- 
tion, University of Chicago; Philander P. Claxton, United States (Commis- 
sioner Education; A. Caswell Ellis, Professor of Education, University of 
Texas; Milton Fairchild, John M. T. Finney, M. D., Associate Professor 
Surgery, Johns Hopkins Hospital; Robert Garrett, Henry C. King, Pres- 
ident Oberlin College; Henry B. Jacobs, President Hospital for Consump- 
tives, Baltimore; Ernest C. Moore, Professor Education, Yale University; 
M. V. O'Shea, Professor Education, Wisconsin University; Thomas Nelson 
Page, David Snedden, State Commissioner Education; Archibald H. Taylor, 
Charles H. Torsch, James H. Van Sickle, Superintendent Public Schools, 
Springfield, Mass.; Mary E. WooUey, President Mount Holyoke College; 
A. Duncan Yocum, Professor Pedagogy, University of Pennsylvania. 



VISUAL INSTRUCTION IN MORALS 113 

Five such lessons are at present in use. For students in the 
high school there are three — "Personal and National Thrift"; 
"Conduct Becoming a Gentleman"; "The True Sportsman." 
For the older elementary pupils (nine to fourteen years) there is 
a lesson : " What I am Going to Do When I am Grown Up, or 
What Is the Use of Going to School? " For the younger elemen- 
tary pupils (six to nine years) there is the lesson, " What People 
Think About Boys' Fights." In this we aim to drive home that 
most fights are foolish, that defending the rights of others, espe- 
cially of the weak, is most truly brave; that bullies are cowardly; 
that people do not like fighting, because it is disorderly; that men 
talk out their differences of opinion, or go to law; that games 
are better than fights. It is proposed to add for next year's use 
a lesson for elementary schools on " Keeping Clean and Well " and 
another on " WTiat Belongs to Me and What Does Not." The 
full course when completed will include about sixty lessons. 

An aggregate audience of about 400,000 boys and girls has been 
reached. At least two-thirds of the leading public school edu- 
cators are personally known to be favorable to the use of this 
visual instruction in morals. I have never known an intelligent 
educator to sit through the three high school lessons given to the 
same audience on three successive days, and doubt the effective- 
ness of the instruction. 

An editorial from " The Journal of Education," April 4, 
1912, by Dr. A. E. Winship says: 

"Milton Fairchild finished his moral instruction trip in Massachusetts 
two months ago. At that time we noted the general satisfaction felt 
throughout the State that his method of visual instruction was effective. 
And now we are able to announce that the reported results of his work 
are such as to justify this general satisfaction and approval expressed 
during his trip. 

" The State Department of Education sent inquiries to normal, high 
school, and grammar school principals where the illustrated lessons had 
been given to ascertain the general attitude of the class while the lesson 
was being given; any subsequent reactions which had been noticed either in 
conduct or attitude toward the lesson, and to discover the opinions of the 
principals as to the value of the lessons. 

" In thirty lessons before an aggregate audience of 17,000 the attitude 
of the classes was reported as ' admirable,' ' intensely interested,' ' most 
attentive,' and so on in every case but one. 

" As to subsequent reactions toward the lesson, either in conduct or 



114 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

attitude, the reports showed considerable uncertainty. Some thought they 
saw immediate good effects. Another wrote that ' the lectures provoked 
considerable discussion which, I believe, helped to strengthen the good 
effect. From time to time I note specific results from these lectures in 
certain statements and acts of the students.' The criticisms which came in 
under the head of personal opinions and suggestions were uniformly favor- 
able. Suggestions for minor changes in method were made by several, all 
in kindly spirit, of improving a plan already well developed. The pictures 
were considered extremely valuable. A principal from western Massa- 
chusetts added that he had ' never known of a stronger impression by any 
other device.' Another ' considered the pictures made the points concrete, 
and thus added to the effectiveness of the lessons, and the fact that there 
was no attempt to preach, but that simply point after point was presented 
quickly, added to their helpfulness.' " 

Further information may be obtained by writing to the Head- 
quarters of the National Instituiton for Moral Instruction, 507 
North Charles Street, Baltimore, Md. 



EDUCATION FOR PARENTHOOD IN RELATION TO 
MORAL TRAINING 

Helen C. Putnam, M.D., Providence, Rhode Island. 

EX-PRESIDENT OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF MEDICINE 

Life is a Trust received from Many 
who have gone before; to be guarded and 
bettered in One's turn; and passed 
along to Many after. 

" Moral training " is training to use wholesomely all one's 
powers in accordance with the Creator's laws. It requires control 
or elimination of influence injuring health, physical, mental and 
moral, personal and social. 

Our imminent problem in human betterment arises from the 
mental attitudes that have increasingly over-emphasized anatomic 
distinctions of reproductive capacity, oblivious, to the point of de- 
basement, of their creative purpose — the Child — the future of 
the race. 

This over-emphasis of sex has so permeated church customs, 
legal and educational, governmental and social fashions, that ab- 
normal discriminations with no biologic justification have resulted 



EDUCATION FOR PARENTHOOD 115 

in one of the great crises of history. We seem on the point of dis- 
placing this short-sighted scheme of society artificially based on 
imagined sex distinctions and the gratification of the individual man 
or woman by making our own the Creator's purpose so far as we 
understand it — the evolution of a better humanity. 

The founder of one great religion, Christ, refused to teach 
merely " sex hygiene." Probably he appreciated the futility of an 
aborted ideal. After each man who would throw a stone admitted 
his part in degrading the function of passing on the torch of life 
entrusted to each for a few years, he sent away the woman, too, 
uncondemned. 

But when an occasion was fitting he placed a little child in the 
midst of the men and women, and told them the reward for right 
living, their eternal future about which they were thinking so much, 
is in the quality of their children — " Of such is the Kingdom of 
Heaven " ; not in the child's helplessness, nor in its ignorance, nat- 
ural laws of growth care for these; but in the child's potentialities 
for conformity to divine laws culminating humanity's achievements 
in learning them and in establishing their observance — physical 
laws, mental laws, spiritual laws. 

No one can, if he would, escape this responsibility for the fu- 
ture of humanity. Each focuses in one's self an inheritance from 
an infinite past, a Trust extending beyond the limits of history and 
of imagination, that he may cut short physically, or pass on bet- 
tered or accursed. With the physical trust are also its mental or 
spiritual manifestations that can in no wise be ended, even if one 
does not become a parent. The individual's influence on environ- 
ment helps make the world and its children. 

The fact of and the responsibility for this Trust can be made 
clear even to the age of toys. The conception is best instilled then, 
when ideas take possession that will dominate life. The cycle from 
seed to flower and seed again, the fertilization of seeds, the inheri- 
tance of characteristics from one or the other parent, and from 
environment are fascinating to a child guided to observe them by a 
reasonably intelligent instructor; their parallelism to human fami- 
lies is manifold; the lesson of responsibility for this Trust of Life 
is demonstrated — not merely words and theory. The animal king- 
dom under similar intelligent guidance is equally useful in testify- 
ing the infinite past and infinite future of the Trust. 

Before the age of puberty the elements of the physiology (and 



116 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

anatomy) of reproduction, with consciousness of its responsibility, 
should come to be understood by as natural steps as the alternation 
of seasons or of day and night. The only difficulty is the vulgar 
thinking adult. A child's clear mind knows no embarrassments 
until the clouds of ignorance in some older one cast their shadows 
there. 

A child loves to be trusted, and loves responsibility according 
to his strength. Responsibility is as indispensable to character 
building as physical exercise to body building. A trust implies 
relations to others — to those from whom it comes and to those to 
whom it must go. The Trust of Life prompts gratitude, apprecia- 
tion, even reverence on the one hand; on the other, forethought, 
self-control, efficiency. It is concrete. It is unescapable, even by 
suicide. It places the ego in its true relation to the universe. 
Self-ness (usually selfishness) is seen to be a cooperating link — 
nothing else — but of literally infinite importance to the ancestors 
gone before and to the generations that will arise. 

" Heaven " and " hell " as inducements for right living have 
failed; being good for a reward is so ignoble a motive that it is 
self-destructive. The " believer " too often is willing to " take 
chances " of being " forgiven " ; the sceptic gratifies the present 
desire. 

The idea of God is vague. The fact of parenthood is every- 
where with its infinite reachings into the past and into the future, 
its definite duties and responsibilities in the present; obedience to 
laws of health in order to pass along a clean inheritance, efficiency 
in labor in order to provide a suitable home, with supplementary 
wisdom and generosity in community afi'airs to make a better en- 
vironment. Whether health, or home or community welfare, one 
or two or all three, the motive is not one's own happiness. The 
motive is the Children yet to be and the discharge of the Trust, or, 
if one so pleased to call it, the " Kingdom of Heaven." 

Parenthood is the greatest vocation. Men and women have 
been picking up their knowledge of home making through a little 
hearsay, or a little undirected reading, and perhaps a little practice 
in childhood homes. We are discovering through vital statistics 
that picked up knowledge of parenthood is as wasteful of life as 
was picked up knowledge of nursing before the days of training 
schools. 



CHARACTER-BUILDING IN DEAF-MUTES 117 

The greatest educational outlook of the day lies in the estab- 
lishment of continuation schools or classes of home making for 
adolescents and young adults millions of whom are in no schools, 
millions not at work, all eligible for parenthood. These are the 
strategic years, when home making instincts are waking and strong- 
est, for enlisting intelligent cooperation of the people in the ele- 
ments of eugenics, in the essentials for making better parents of 
better children. The reaction on the usual academic curriculum of 
elementary and high schools will be profound. 

Education for parenthood is as definite a process as education 
for vocations whose object is chiefly money getting, including these 
and adding more; for while parents must be earners and spenders, 
they must be also much else, the father as well as the mother. The 
wife alone cannot make " home," nor should she be handicapped by 
ignorance or inefficiency of the husband in the endless duties and 
responsibilities of caring for the family. Both need, and in a few 
places are now receiving, elementary instruction in biologic laws 
of the family, in eugenics, in social conditions affecting the family; 
in infant care and child psychology; in sanitary and hygienic meth- 
ods, as well as in recreative, intellectual and spiritual aspects of 
home life. 

For the first time in the education of the young the object is 
definitely stated to be " Improving the individual so that future 
generations may attain higher levels than those preceding them." 
Education before this has stopped with more or less of improving 
the individual so that he may win " success," or " happiness," or 
wealth. This holds up an ideal of responsibility that is infinite — ■ 
future generations. 

Education for parenthood irradiates the one supreme testimony 
of moral worth — " losing one's life to find it " — intelligently uni- 
fying the intensity of married and of parental loves with love for 
the whole human race. 



CHARACTER-BUILDING IN DEAF-MUTES 
Thomas Francis Fox, M. A. Litt. D. 

PROFESSOR IN THE NEW YORK INSTITUTION FOR THE INSTRUCTION 
OF THE DEAF AND DUMB 

If we consider the moral condition of an uneducated deaf- 
mute, it will be found truly lamentable. Even thoughtful people 



118 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL, EDUCATION CONGRESS 

do not understand the great handicap under which he labors. 
People are prone to overlook how much of mental and moral de- 
velopment comes through the ear in childhood, during all the 
years of rapid growth in thought and affection. The formative 
influence of example and precept, and the powerful incitement of 
intelligent instruction must come largely through the ear. When 
this avenue is closed, the growth in knowledge, faith and charity 
must be incomparably slower and more difficult than when it is 
open. 

The term deaf-mute, however, should be limited in its ap- 
plication to those whose deafness is congenital, or has been oc- 
casioned soon after birth. Children who have retained hearing 
till the ages of four, five or six years, enjoy a higher scale of ex- 
istence. They may lose the remembrance of articulate sounds, 
but, having the germs of thought, knowledge and language that 
have been implanted in their minds through the ear, they usually 
respond to oral training, such as is afforded to deaf children 
in most schools for the deaf, at least in America. The same 
peculiarities, therefore, cannot be predicted of them, as of that 
still more unfortunate class who have never had intellectual con- 
tact with their kind. In the uneducated deaf-mute we see mind, 
possessing all the powers with which it was created, yet prevented 
from exercising them upon their appropriate objects, intellect con- 
fined within a prison. 

As a consequence of the darkness in which their minds are 
wrapped, deaf-mutes before education have no true idea of 
morality. The gestures they employ in communication with their 
friends are confined to the persons, objects and usages with which 
they become familiar. Rarely is a parent successful in drawing 
out their ideas beyond the pale of the sensible objects with which 
they are surrounded. They certainly have not been led to con- 
ceive of a thinking agent within them, distinct from their corporal 
existence. They can, therefore, form no correct idea of right or 
duty — of intellectual in distinction from material things. 

In beginning instruction, the dignity of the child's moral na- 
ture is considered, since every sparkling eye reveals a soul whose 
worth and destiny are precious. It is of great importance, then, 
that the proper foundation should be well laid. Since the heart 
is the noblest part of human nature, giving direction and impart- 
ing energy to the other faculties ; as the affections are the springs 



CHARACTER-BUILDING IN DEAF-MUTES 119 

of action, and it is upon them that motives exert their power, it is 
proper that in all education we begin there. We begin then, to 
secure the affections of the children as early and as fully as pos- 
sible; not by the contrivance of art but by the warmth of a hearty 
love towards them, inspiring a corresponding affection in. return. 
Next in order is to awaken and cherish in them a cordial attach- 
ment to their classmates and companions, and by frequent allu- 
sions to their parents and brothers and sisters, add strength to their 
natural affection for home and family. From the fact that deaf- 
mute children are generally isolated in the community, and are 
not eligible for admission to public schools for the hearing, it has 
become necessary to gather them together in residence at school. 
Here they are received with the true ideal of parental training, 
which without question, makes the moral welfare of the child 
paramount to every other consideration. 

There are extremists, of course, who would represent deaf- 
ness as a slight inconvenience, and deaf-mute instruction as so 
very quick and simple that it is a pity all are not deaf, to have 
the advantage of it. The deaf, however, in the attempt at a mas- 
tery of a spoken language through sight and without sound, know 
to the contrary by said experience. In their instruction, deaf- 
mute children and uneducated adults alike require a teaching 
which, is marked by extreme simplicity of ideas, vivid gesture, 
simplicity of matter and perspicuity of manner. They enter 
school in an intellectual and moral state for which there is no 
name. They have no language, no alphabet, and are ignorant 
indeed of everything except what they have perceived through 
other channels than the ear, much of which they have, most prob- 
ably, imperfectly and even wrongly apprehended. Nevertheless, 
the deaf child has the same natural faculties of soul and spirit as 
his hearing relatives, the same capacity for receiving and as- 
similating knowledge the same temptations and trials, duties and 
joys. But he has been excluded from all that varied knowledge 
which the hearing unconsciously and without effort imbibe in daily 
life. He knows nothing of the touching power of the human 
voice, and even after considerable instruction, his mind is not very 
highly cultivated; in truth, the deaf-mute child remains a babe 
in intelligence very much longer than the normal child, for he has 
no power to formulate his incipient thoughts, or words to clothe 
them. 



120 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

The deaf-mute is, moreover, often deficient in the power and 
habit of analysis and generalization — the capacity for grasping 
the full meaning of a truth and tracing its developments, and of 
observing the analogy and proportion of the same. He lacks, 
also, the faculty of systemization, of expressing clearly what he 
does know. Hence, in his instruction, unity must be observed; 
the divisions of a subject must be few and simple, the logic clear, 
the deductions obvious and of immediate practical application. 

Again, even after considerable instruction, his knowledge of 
words, as a rule, is rather imperfect, his vocabulary being limited 
to the requirements of every-day life. He reads so slowly, and 
with much stumbling over individual difficulties that he fails to 
get a connected and clear impression of the whole text, and still 
more of the connection and course of the argument. 
All these points have to be remembered and considered by the 
teacher. Where deep-reaching results are to be aimed at with 
the deaf, and the rapid acquisition of knowledge to be desired, 
the system of signs has an advantage over the articulation method 
which, at best, can impart to most deaf-mutes but a few crude 
ideas, and little or no information, and it follows that in the early 
stages of their education the use of natural signs is not only of 
intrinsic value, but an indispensable necessity. If speech alone is 
employed, it requires that instruction upon moral subjects be de- 
ferred to a late period in the course, while experience proves that 
the earlier the child begins the better. (The great value of visual 
language, manifested by the countenance, and the attitudes, move- 
ments and gestures of the body in the education of deaf-mutes, 
will appear if we consider some of its other uses.) 

The deaf-mute in the family and the school cannot be brought 
under a wholesome government and discipline without it. Moral 
influence is the great instrument to be used in this government 
and discipline. The conscience is to be addressed and enlightened; 
the right and wrong to be unfolded and made clear to the mind; 
a knowledge of those simple truths which affect our character 
and conduct is to be conveyed to him who is, as yet, ignorant of 
them. The blessings that attend virtue, and the evils of vice are 
to be portrayed. Motives are to be presented. An enlightened 
self-interest is to be awakened; a laudable ambition to be excited; 
hope to be enkindled and, sometimes, fear to be aroused. The 
child to be taught to feel and act entirely right, so as to secure 



CHARACTER-BUILDING IN DEAF-MUTES 121 

the efficacy of a settled principle and the uniformity of a fixed 
habit, must feel and act morally in all his relations and respon- 
sibilities. The moral influence, too, must reach him as a social 
being. He must feel it in common with others of the community 
to which he belongs, for its eff'ect upon us all is greatly enhanced 
by thus feeling it. How is this to be done? 

It is impossible without suitable means of communication, in- 
telligible to such a mind. There must be teacher and learner, one 
who addresses and one who is addressed. For in order to ex- 
ercise a successful moral influence over the child so as to lead 
him to do right of choice, his confidence in his guide and governor 
must be secured. In cultivating this confidence, he must often be 
listened to patiently by the parent and teacher. He will have his 
questions to ask, his inquiries to make, his doubts and diflficulties 
to state, that he may fully understand and feel what his duty is, 
and sometimes his excuses and extenuations to give, that he may 
escape blame when he does not deserve it. Collisions of feelings 
and of interest will arise between him and his fellows. Rights, 
on the one side or the other, have been assailed, or wrongs inflicted. 
Each of the parties claims the privilege of stating his own case. 
They must both be heard. Facts must be inquired into, perhaps 
witnesses called in. Else, impartial and strict justice cannot be 
done. And if it is not done, confidence is weakened and some- 
times lost, and authority by moral influence paralyzed or de- 
stroyed. 

For all these purposes the child, as has been said, must have 
a language at command, common to him and the teacher, by which 
to make his thoughts and feelings known. This is indispensable 
to the exercise of a wholesome government and discipline over 
him. One other very important thing is to be taken into account. 
Moral truths, as we have seen, have to be presented by the teacher 
to the pupil; but the latter may be too young to receive and un- 
derstand these truths under the form of abstract propositions. 
Abstract terms, and those of generalization are not now level to 
his capacity. He as yet thinks in particulars. The teacher must 
go into particulars. He must describe individuals as acting right 
or wrong; present illustrations; draw out detailed circumstances; 
give facts graphically and minutely delineated to bring out the 
truths he wishes to present and inculcate. By degrees, he can un- 
fold the powers of abstraction and generalization in the child, and 



122 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

be doing his work in a more concise way. But, at first, and in- 
deed for a considerable length of time, he must patiently take 
the slow, inductive process. And in order to conduct this process, 
he needs a language common to him and the child, having graph- 
ical powers capable of particularizing thought. 

With this understanding of the mental condition of the con- 
genital deaf-mute without instruction, and of the devoted and pro- 
longed attention which his physical defect renders necessary, we 
may begin to consider intelligently what is demanded in one who 
u^ndertakes the moral instruction of this class of the community. 
The true preceptor is always he whose motive is benevolence and 
whose aim is not merely to cultivate the intellect, nor to impart 
human knowledge, but to make good citizens and moral men and 
women. We cannot lay down any definite rule that because a 
teacher can or cannot hear, he or she will succeed better than the 
other. Still we must recognize that among the common tendencies 
in our natures, that which seeks its gratification along the line of 
a propensity to affiliate with its own kind is one of the strongest. 
For this reason, if no other, the influence of the deaf teacher upon 
deaf-mute children out-balances that of the hearing. It is a law 
of natiire that like attracts like, and it is in keeping with this 
law that a deaf child should be more interested in one who knows 
by reason of his own experience the difficulties which his pupil 
has to overcome. Such a teacher comprehends the nature of the 
deaf-mute child better, sympathizes with him more intimately, and 
is not so apt to minimize his abilities nor to expect too much from 
instruction. Above all he has fewer outside personal and busi- 
ness relations to divide his time. Consequently his interest does 
not end with the classroom work, but he mingles in their home 
society, knows their joys and sorrows, and is their adviser and 
friend always. That hearing teachers have also shown like quali- 
ties in many instances, is amply attested by the wonderful suc- 
cess that has attended their efforts as instructors. Nevertheless 
it remains true that to comprehend fully the peculiar position of 
deaf-mutes, to understand the way to their minds and their hearts, 
one must be attached to them by the very closest sympathy, such 
as is found only among the deaf themselves. 

In the various American State Schools for the education of 
deaf-mutes, there are 287 deaf teachers of both sexes employed, 
which includes three who teach the deaf-blind. Many of these 



CHARACTER-BUILDING IN DEAF-MUTES 123 

are men and women of culture and refinemient, of college and 
Tiniversity training, with broad and strong intellects who touch 
the life of the great world on as many sides as their impediment 
permits. Their writings, which are numerous, give evidence of 
deep study and close observation of all phases of deaf-mute educa- 
tion, and not a few of them are recognized authorities on special 
branches of the work. 

What has been said of deaf teachers with deaf-mutes applies 
with still greater force to the teaching of those who lack the 
senses of both sight and hearing — the deaf-blind. In this line 
of teaching, several deaf teachers have won notable success in a 
work requiring instruction through the sense of touch, by spelling 
into the hands of the pupils. Here the teacher must be in reality 
the constant companion, instructor, guide and friend. Among 
those who have attained remarkable success in this line may be 
mentioned Miss Myra L. Barrager, a teacher in the New York 
Institution for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb, who has, 
at various times during the last dozen years, taught nine diiferent 
deaf-blind pupils, and with loving devotion brought them tO' a 
high state of proficiency in various studies, from the simplest 
English to advanced Latin. Herself deaf from the age of four, 
she has given this special branch of instruction her most earnest 
thought and attention, coming to it after a long apprenticeship 
in the most difficult department of deaf-mute instruction — ^the 
primary grade. During seventeen years' experience in the pri- 
mary department, she had full opportunity to analyze the unde- 
veloped mentality which lies dormant in the uneducated con- 
genitally deaf child. In addition to this, she brings to her 
work the zeal flowing from affectionate sympathy with and de- 
votion to the welfare of her charges. Indeed, without any re- 
quirement to do so, but from pure love for her pupils, she has not 
only given to the children individual care and attention in their 
literary studies, but has also directed them in acquiring a prac- 
tical use of the needle and of knitting. 

Where, as in this case, the teacher thoroughly understands her 
charges, as well as their needs, and enters into her work with 
sympathetic, earnest spirit, she cannot fail to accomplish most 
gratifying results. 



124 SECOND INTEENATIONAIi MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

THE MORAL INSTRUCTION OF THE DEAF 
Harris Taylor 

principal, institution for the improved instruction of deaf- 
mutes, new york 

The congenitally deaf upon entering school are practically 
without means of communication, with very little mental develop- 
ment, and apparently without moral sense beyond an idea that 
certain things are not expedient. An eminent deaf sculptor once 
said that " the congenitally deaf child is a born liar and thief, and 
will forget his mother in three days after entering a school for 
the deaf." Upon leaving school^ however, they usually connect 
themselves with some religious body and are generally self-support- 
ing, law-abiding citizens. Whatever defects they may have, they 
are fully the equals of their hearing brothers in general integrity. 

The first schools for the deaf in America were established as 
manual or silent schools, employing gestures, finger-spelling, and 
writing as means of communication between teacher and pupils. 
While giving the pupils ability to use written language and thereby 
to acquire an elementary education and to learn the rudiments of 
a trade, the deaf were not taught to speak, and their communica- 
tion with the world of the hearing was mainly by means of pencil 
and paper. Unquestionably, by means of the sign or gesture 
language, teachers were able to give the deaf effective moral instruc- 
tion. Yet notwithstanding the advantages above mentioned, many 
parents declined to send their deaf children to these silent schools, 
because children who had learned to speak before they became deaf 
would soon become dumb in an environment of utter stillness. 

In 1864 Isaac Rosenfeld of New York City, and Gardiner G. 
Hubbard of Massachusetts, began to make investigations in re- 
gard to methods of teaching the deaf, and learned that the oral 
method, by means of speech and lip-reading was used more ex- 
tensively than the silent method in Europe. Acting independently 
of each other, each in that year was instrumental in founding an 
oral school for the deaf, the one in New York City and the other 
at Chelmsford, Massachusetts. Both schools developed into large 
institutions for the deaf and were instrumental in causing a modi- 
fication or radical change in the methods of instructing the deaf 



DELINQUENT GIRLS 125 

throughout the United States. To-day only one small school uses 
the silent method exclusively; in practically all schools a large 
percentage of the pupils are taught orally; and in a large number 
of schools the oral method is used exclusively. Regardless of their 
personal preference^ teachers of the deaf are practically unani- 
mous in the opinion that the best schools for the deaf in the world 
are oral schools. Statistics prove conclusively that practically all 
pupils now entering schools for the deaf are placed under oral 
instruction. 

I have taught under both silent and oral methods and have 
presented moral instruction both orally and by means of signs, 
and can say without hesitation that both are capable mediums for 
presenting moral training. I prefer the oral method, however, for 
an oral school, because it is in harmony with the instruction in 
other branches and enables the child better to understand books 
on moral subjects. It is obvious that the language which is ad- 
mittedly the best for teaching history, geography, and literature 
must have equal merit in dealing with moral subjects. 

Broadly speaking, the moral instruction should be along the 
lines of their instruction in general. If conveyed by the silent 
method, it is obvious that their moral instruction can not be given 
by other than silent means of communication. If they are taught 
by mixed methods, the probability is that their speech and lip- 
reading are so defective as to make signs and finger-spelling de- 
sirable in part at least. If they are taught orally in other branches, 
the most efficient moral instruction can be given by word of mouth. 



DELINQUENT GIRLS * 

Annie Winsor Allen 

former member board of managers of the new york state 
training school for girls at hudson 

The question " how to save girls who have fallen " shows forth 
in its phrasing three, interesting, useful, and withal exasperating 
tendencies of the human mind — the tendencies to use stock ideas, 
to overemphasize acquired ideas, and to substitute types for class- 
ideas. To our own very human minds, as we read the phrase, the 
* Reprinted from The Survey, August 6, 1910. 



126 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL, EDUCATION CONGRESS 

words are a settled euphemism for a problem^ too terrible to state 
literally. To us a " fallen woman " or a " bad girl " is one whose 
whole nature is warped and unlovely; her desires are merged into 
one desire and that an uncontrolled perversion of a sacred function j 
her interests are similarly simple^ everything feeds her self-grat- 
ification; she can never take up the natural life of varied impulse 
and interest^ of unselfish aifection and activity. To " save " such 
a person means to draw her soul by repentance from the awful 
eternal consequences of her wicked way of life. 

Yet the words themselves convey no such dread thoughts. To 
save a child which has fallen, merely means to pick it up, give it 
necessary restoratives if it is stunned or weakened, and put it into 
the care of someone who understands such cases — a good doctor 
or nurse or mother. 

The dire meanings which we read into the words of this title,, 
come to us from our racial experience. Vv'e have seized upon this 
phrase to represent a stock idea created by our racial need. The 
human race needed to abhor sexual irregularity in women. The 
rational judgment of strong individual leaders became the acquired 
ideas of the average mind and quickly swelled into unreasoned 
prejudice. 

First one typical phrase and then another, through history, 
has been used to express the racial dread of women who misuse 
their organs of reproduction. This modern phrase, " fallen 
woman," replaced the brutal " harlot " and " wanton " of an earlier 
generation. It is our inheritance from loving hearts, smitten with 
pity for the sufferings of others, who first suspected that a " har- 
lot " might not be " wanton." She might not have chosen her 
course. Perhaps she had only slipped and " fallen." They would 
try to " save " her. Having no scientific habit of thought or ob- 
servation, they acted upon their own impressions and conclusions as 
to the causes of her errancy, and they tried the only means of 
reclamation which occurred to them. 

But the public mind remained the same, and " fallen woman " 
speedily came to mean exactly what the harsher words had meant 
before it. The phrase expressed a type, a necessary stock idea. 
To its originators it expressed merely a class. But the average 
human mind always tends to reduce each class to a type. The 
type is a convenience. It is never an accurate picture, and can 
be useful only to its possessor, never to its object. Of course, no 



DELINaUENT GIRLS 127 

human creature ever becomes a type. A man by becoming a clergy- 
man does not thereby throw off all characteristics but those which 
distinguish clergymen from others (though his flock inevitably ex- 
pect it of him) ; a woman who writes is not therefore precluded 
from a capacity to sew and cook (astonished though her friends 
always are that she is not!). Yet we habitually observe classes 
and immediately think of them as castes ; the class idea promptly 
becomes a type, represented by a phrase — such as " the fallen 
woman/' the " bad girl." But the conception does not fit a piece 
of human nature. It describes a type. It is merely such a thing 
as we create always in our minds when we wish for our own con- 
venience to represent a class. 

It is almost world-old, it is certainly as old as civilization, this 
race-created notion that girls who have gone wrong cannot be 
brought right. Common experience has disproved it innumerable 
times for each generation. Yet the notion still lingers in the gen- 
eral mind. As a matter of fact, ever since monogamy became the 
accepted ideal of our portion of the globe, a large proportion of 
" fallen " girls have every year been safely married, become 
mothers quite as good as the ordinary, and had husbands quite as 
faithful as the husbands of their neighbors. Yet most men, espe- 
cially policemen and police justices, have a customary and unques- 
tioning conviction that " fallen " girls are saturated with the con- 
sequence of their sexual misuse and cannot be penetrated with 
other interests. 

This is largely because a certain proportion of such girls do 
slip into habitual misbehavior. And they are the portion most 
conspicuous to policemen and police justices and to many other 
men, for it is these girls who become permanent members of a 
class which no man honors but many men use. This is the class 
which is distinct and picturesque, and upon it the old idea persists 
as a type. Strong men, individual leaders of long past genera- 
tions, gradually created this type-idea, in trying to instruct and 
protect the women of their own families. Well-guarded, domestic, 
innocent women following these leaders adopted it and in them it 
became an unreasoning prejudice, because they were wholly ig- 
norant of the actual creature whose existence gave rise to the 
idea which created the type. 

In days when almost all men were incontinent, innocent women 
needed outward show of protection, and seldom had in themselves 



128 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

the hardy temperament necessary to moving about freely. But in 
our generation, so many men have high standards of honor and 
continence that they enforce a public show of their standards upon 
almost all men. These men thus constitute a public guard for 
women and their presence has created a public conduct which 
makes it possible for women to go about alone uninjured and un- 
suspected. Consequently, many well-guarded, domestic and inno- 
cent women are able to become informed by their own observations 
about the actual " fallen girl." These women now reject the type, 
not because the basic idea is wrong, but because in educational 
work one must not think in types at all; one must think in human 
terms of human individuals. The stock idea, however, which 
created the type, is, so far as it goes, right; it springs from a 
racial need, to wit: wherever women permit their bodies to be used 
for the purposeless exercise of the reproductive function, there 
life for the advancement of the race becomes impossible. Of 
course, if we are to have happy, serene homes where boys can 
grow up well-protected and trained to an increasingly better man- 
hood than their fathers', and where girls can develop safely, then 
women must keep their bodies for motherhood, and for mother- 
hood protected by all devisable safeguards from the possibility of 
a husband's defection and a father's disappearance; protected, too, 
from the mother's own possible restlessness and desertion, A girl 
must remain a virgin until she becomes a wife. She must be made 
to abhor any other thought. She must realize that if she does not 
remain pure, she is no longer in the company of valuable women. 
She has fallen and become unfit for her proper use, unfit for 
honor and praise. Hence the opposed types of the Pure and the 
Sinful. Hence, the lurid color given to the type of a " bad 
woman." The race could never have advanced without this belief. 
It is absolutely essential to our life. It is herein absolutely right. 
The difficulty of it for our present purpose is that it in no way 
helps to solve the question of what can be done for the girl who 
has failed, for any cause, to remain unspotted, or who is on the 
path to failure. Our question is how to save girls. This is an 
educational, individual question — not a racial need. 

The conventional conception not only does not help to solve 
this question, but it confuses the minds of those who are sincerely 
trying to solve it. This troublesome fact was shown plainly when 
the conclusions which form the bulk of this article were presented 



DELINaUENT GIRLS 129 

(in much these same words) to two or three hundred workers in 
charities and correction. To the men in the audience the aspect 
presented and the explanation given, apparently seemed wholly- 
new — almost revolutionary. To the women they seemed familiar, 
but until then unspoken and even unthought. Yet everyone felt 
the view to be valid. The tyranny of phrases and of types — of 
" stock ideas " — had been upon them all until then — not from 
choice or perversity, not from annoyance or cold-heartedness, but 
because of the power of racial ideas when they express a racial 
need, though never so grossly and stupidly. 

This stock idea had sprung from racial need. Society's de- 
mand had impressed itself upon the common mind. 

Society, however, following merely the racial instinct of self- 
preservation, considers only consequences, and seeks prevention. 
It does not interest itself in causes and cures. The cause and the 
cure are of interest to individuals who have suffered, or to other 
individuals who have pitied their sufferings, and to others still 
who see that the race will not reach final prevention except by the 
study of causes and the devising of cures. But causes and cures 
are not discerned by instinct — studying and devising are done by 
the mind. 

We must observe and think if we would save girls. First we 
must observe the causes of wrong-doing. 

Definitions of crime and wrong-doing have always been made 
in the interests of society as a whole, entirely on the basis of con- 
sequences to society. Prostitution has been deeply condemned be- 
cause of its ill effect upon the development of the race. Ethically, 
this and all other lapses from sexual rectitude are regarded with 
the extremest abhorrence. Legally, it has never been brought 
within the same ban as murder and theft because the harm it does 
is not immediate and obvious. When murder or theft is committed, 
the persons harmed object always and openly. It is not so with 
sex-abuse: here the harm is gradual and often remote, while the 
injured persons, the man, the woman and the possible child, are 
not able to understand their own injury. But society in the long 
run understands, and classes these injuries as first of all in moral 
offense. 

Murder is caused by anger in one form or another (such as 
jealousy, envy and the like). Anger, natural as it is, plays no 
essential part in the development of the race. It is merely a 



130 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL, EDUCATION CONGRESS 

result of the irritation of an ignorant mind incapable of compre- 
hending and controlling its environment, Theft^ however, is 
caused by the desire to have what you have not. This is an en- 
tirely normal, useful and permanent instinct, the instinct to acqui- 
sition, the instinct which leads our race on into increasing devel- 
opment. It becomes wrong objectively only when it fixes itself 
upon possessions which have already been acquired by someone 
else. Though normal, and necessary to the development of our 
race, it is not essential to the perpetuation of the race any more 
than murder is. It is different from murder again, in being uni- 
personal. Murder is bi-personal. It involves two, the murderer and 
his victim. Theft involves another person only indirectly. So 
far as the thief goes, he might much prefer not having any owner 
to the goods which he steals. His acquisitiveness would have fuller 
exercise without the interference of any other person. 

Prostitution, along with nearly all the other misuses of sex 
power, is not caused, like theft, by a mental condition or, even 
like murder, by an emotional condition. It is caused by a purely 
physical condition. The instinct of reproduction lies wholly in 
the nerves, not in the mind. In this it is akin to hunger, not to 
anger. But unlike hunger, it requires not a thing but a person 
to appease it, and unlike hunger its appeasement is not necessary 
to the life or even to the health of the individual. But this in- 
stinct is essential to the perpetuation of the race, and unlike any- 
thing else it is tri-personal. It involves man, woman and child in 
one blessing or one curse. 

To the race, then, and to society as its unconscious mouthpiece, 
prostitution or anything like it is a vital offense, because of its 
terrible consequences. To the individual, using it as a gratifica- 
tion or a livelihpod, it seems a mere matter of course, a necessity, 
because of its natural cause. What then is society going to do 
about it? How get rid of the intolerable consequences in a girl 
of a purely natural and necessary instinct? How can she be 
cured and saved from continuance in her mistake? A murderer 
may be cured by learning pity and self-control. A thief may be 
cured by learning respect for the rights of others. The one mends 
his emotions, the other mends his mind. But if either is saturated 
with a craving for the act itself, then he cannot be cured. But 
an immoral girl — can her instinct be restored to its rightful use ? 
Are not her emotions and her mind wholly perverted? 



DELINQUENT GIELS 131 

To each of these questions we can answer no. Physically 
her instincts are not perverted until she has been in such life for 
at least six or eight years, and even then if she is under twenty she 
often has remained physically healthy. As for her mind and emo- 
tions, in almost every girl the falling is purely physical, simply 
an excitation of the nerves. No love or personal passion is usually 
involved, and no thought of any kind. There is never any pre- 
vision. If she foresaw she would withstand. 

Unlike a boy, a girl has no insistent physical impulse which 
urges to sexuality. She has general vague nerve sensations in the 
presence of sensuous men which appear to her to be emotions, 
rather than sensations originating merely in her nerves. When 
these nerves have been aroused by exciting physical stimuli, she 
becomes a passive agent. When an insistent, active appetite or 
craving exists in a girl, it is produced by experience, by over- 
excitation, physical or mental, or by some abnormal physical forma- 
tion. The normal physical condition of a young girl is quiescent. 
Rapid approach produces only shrinking. Gradual approach, how- 
ever, will overcome any unprotected young ^irl. She has not 
chosen, she has merely fallen. 

Here and there an exceptional girl proves to be well guarded 
by a specially resistant nervous system. But to wait for proof is 
to risk failure. The risk is too great. Every girl, to be safe, must 
be protected by strong ideals, non-selfish interests, and agreeable, 
wholesome pleasures. In addition to these she needs watchful 
surveillance; in default of them, she must have strict surveillance. 
The course of nature leads only to one end, a simple act with 
strange sad consequences. 

The act was not mental, it does not " touch her psychologic- 
ally," as we say, and she has no conception at all of the dire con- 
sequences which make her acts so abhorrent to us. She is inter- 
ested in the easy irresponsibility, the ready money and the various 
amusements oft'ered. This is all she can see when she is young. 
If she keeps on, she becomes a permanent member of a dishonored 
class. She is increasingly unhappy and dies early. But she need 
not go on. 

Certainly the obvious probabilities are that a girl with health 
good and instincts unperverted can be saved from the elaborate 
consequences of a brief delinquency. In fact the training schools 
have observed and thought, studied and devised, until they do know 



132 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

what can be done to turn a girl away from habits and interests 
which have led her, or will presently lead her, into sexual irregu- 
larity. Training schools have actually learned to cure the fault 
and establish the habits. They began by seeking to know the 
real causes of her mistakes, to learn the nature of her psychological 
and physical life, and to judge from them how to turn her attention 
toward wholesome interests and enlist her loyalty for them. 

The training of girls in public institutions has up to our own 
time been decidedly disheartening. Institution officers, judges and 
policemen, and the outside world as well, all were accustomed to say 
" work with boys is very satisfactory, but girls are discouraging. 
You cannot seem to get hold of a girl when once she has gone 
wrong." Girls seemed to go wrong all over, they apparently went 
to pieces, and people believed that there was no material left in 
them to reform. With a girl they thought it was " once a failure, 
always a failure." What do we mean by failure.'' We mean fail- 
ure to cure the fault which got the child into trouble and sent it to 
an institution. We mean failure to establish habits which make 
the child lead the life of ordinary people afterward. 

First then, what are a girl's special mistakes and their causes? 
How are they different from a boy's ? 

Boys are committed to public guardianship for a great variety 
of misdeeds — " murder," " assault," " theft," " larceny," " for- 
gery," " malicious mischief," " drunkenness," " improper guardian- 
ship," " troublesome child," etc., but practically never for sexual sin. 

Girls are committed — girls of twelve to sixteen — for " pros- 
titution," " associating with vicious persons," " disorderly conduct," 
" improper guardianship," " unmanageable child," but very seldom 
for theft or any other crime, or for drunkenness. Out of 134 
girls, all between twelve and sixteen years old, committed to the 
New York Training School for Girls last year, four were sent for 
theft and one for fogery. Four of these cases were sexually irreg- 
ular, only one did the theft for its own sake. In four years but 
one has been committed for drunkenness. 

That is to say, what society has most to dread and reprobate 
in a boy is crime; what it has to dread in a girl is sexual irregu- 
larity. When we say we failed with a boy, we mean that he be- 
came a criminal or a drunkard in spite of our efforts. When we 
say we failed with a girl, we mean she became a prostitute or led 
an irregular sexual life of some sort. Very few " bad girls " are 



DELINaUENT GIRLS 133 

inclined to crime. Most bad boys are inclined to sexual irregU' 
larity^ but we do not count that as failure. Thus it is true that 
girls are different from boys, their tendencies are different and 
moreover our ideal for girls is different from our ideal for boys. 

Our chief task and aim, then, with delinquent girls is to pro- 
tect them from the natural consequences of being girls. Consider 
what a girl is. 

A girl wants to go about carelessly, thinking only of herself, 
just as a boy does. But the special feature of a girl's physical 
construction is such that she cannot go carelessly and unguardedly 
among lax and self-indulgent men without their making her very 
soon physically subject to them. So there scarcely is a woman 
criminal who is not also of a loose life. The men criminals are, 
of course, all loose-lived too; but we never count that, for conse- 
quences in them are not immediate and glaringly social — they are 
merely such things as disease, weakened will, and the like. On 
the other hand many loose-lived women are not criminals at all. 

This fact about girls, the guardians of public order are begin- 
ning to realize. The police are more and more frequently arrest- 
ing, magistrates are more and more willingly conunitting girls who 
are merely " disobedient " or " likely to become immoral." They 
are realizing that for a girl, prevention is emphatically the best 
cure, the kindest course. They no longer think it a stigma on a 
girl to be taken away from parents who are allowing her to run 
wild. 

Why is our ideal for girls so different from our ideal for 
boys.'' Why do we dread and reprobate so intensely the only sin 
to which girls are very prone, and pass it over so without comment 
in a boy.'' We do it because the race instinct has not yet discerned 
those finer issues which must be reached by following the ideal of 
continence in men. On this matter the strong individual judgments 
of the thinking leaders have not yet become the more aroused 
prejudices of the mass who follow but do not think. Meanwhile, 
our acquired ideal for girls is right and must be preserved. 

Herein then we see the cause of former failures. People be- 
lieved that girls were wrong by choice and volition, or that at least 
their moral natures led them into evil. This was true of boys, why 
not then of girls? They did not consider the wide difference in 
causes between the two sorts of offense. Looking at the conse- 
quences, at the outside social aspect, and seeing it to be so evil. 



134 SECOND INTERNATIONAL, MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

men have concluded that the inner personal state must be cor- 
respondingly vicious. Well-meaning men — unable because they 
were men, to understand — and safe, protected vromen — unable 
because they were ignorant — have guessed wrong. They have 
guessed that a bad result must have a bad cause. 

Not at all! A baby may wreck a railroad train and not be 
even naughty. Choice — volition — must enter into a wrong deed 
before the doer can be called wicked. A person must intend not 
only his act, but the consequences of his act before he can be held 
accountable. Herein, as I said, lies the reason for former failures 
in the training of delinquent girls. They were supposed to be 
themselves as immoral as the consequences of their acts. Nat- 
urally, when their inner condition was so little understood, attempts 
to alter it failed. These girls are generally silly and ignorant; if 
they were not they would not get into trouble. They are usually 
vulgar, stupid, and weak-willed, often very selfish and untruthful, 
but they are seldom in a serious condition morally. Very few of 
them are malicious, or even defiant; they seldom have any desire 
to be mischievous or to do harm of any serious sort to any one. 
They are not perverted — they are stunted. They have measure- 
less capacities for enthusiasm, aspiration and admiration. Person- 
worship is native to them, as it is to all young girls. They wish 
to attach themselves and to give loyal allegiance to someone whom 
they can admire and love. 

The fact is that fully nine-tenths of the girls committed to 
the New York Training School and similar schools are without any 
mental bias in favor of a crooked life. They are untouched emo- 
tionally and mentally; physically they can usually be made healthy. 
They merely need to forget, to gain interests, ambitions and en- 
thusiasms, and to learn how to live well. They have been neglected 
and left unprotected. They are very ignorant. What seems to 
the judges brazen indifference toward the enormity of their con- 
duct is oftenest the utter ignorance of a child. What can a little 
girl of twelve understand of causes and consequences ? 

Present success in setting girls right comes from understand- 
ing that what they need is not regeneration, but merely enlighten- 
ment and direction, assistance and good example and encourage- 
ment. They need only to be steadied, taught, strengthened, made 
more sensitive and waked up mentally, given the wish for imagina- 
tion and conscience. 



DELINQUENT GIRLS 1S5 

At a school they are cared for and taught to care for them- 
selves; to control themselves and to work hard. The school pro- 
tects them and teaches them how and why to protect themselves, 
and is able in most cases to see to it that when they leave they go 
to some better protection than they had before. A number of 
them marry while they are still in charge, or soon after they leave. 

So a life made as normal as possible, presenting at every 
turn the aspect and ideals of a healthy, useful, active, sensible 
home usually fills a young girl's mind so full in eighteen months 
that she has little available space for old memories. Subconscious 
reflex actions have begun to be established on so many fresh lines, 
while the old lines are neglected, that reactions seldom ensue upon 
the old associations. Practically she has forgotten how she used 
to behave and feel. She could tell you, perhaps, if your asking 
prompted her to confidence, but it would be like reading old let- 
ters; at most, the memory is exceedingly inaccurate. Often a girl 
remembers her old surroundings ideally, affectionately, uncrit- 
ically, and complains that she wants to go back and be happy. 
Then some other girl suggests to the matron that it would be " a 
good thing to let her go home, the way I did, and find out how 
different it really is." Often, too, when the girls about to leave 
are given the bundles of clothes which they wore when they en- 
tered, they deny them, declaring with sincerity that they had real 
nice clothes when they came. This is not surprising. We all 
forget our old selves. These girls certainly do forget with the 
extraordinary rapidity of children. 

This is a familiar enough phenomenon to us all and is not 
confined to children. Think of your acquaintance who hoped 
passionately for the love of some special girl, three years ago, and 
she refused him. You happened to be thrown in his intimate com- 
panionship then. He confided it all to you. You remember 
vividly his deep disappointment, his irreparable loss. You have 
not heard about him since. Yesterday you met him again. The 
old remembrance of the broken heart rose to you. It is your only 
association with him and you could hardly speak to him with ordi- 
nary cheerfulness. But he has acquired many associations with 
himself since then. He remembered only that he used to be fond 
of you. He forgets that he ever told you his secrets. He asks 
you home to see his wife and child. Probably the old love looks 
to him now like mere foolishness. 



136 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

In this same way, evil deeds, though they make a deep im- 
pression on those who see them as separate objectionable acts, may 
well become mere blurred memories to him who committed them, 
whether he ceases to do such things thereafter, or goes right on 
with more of the same sort. 

So the girls in a good training school forget, and rebuild them- 
selves. Gradually the " brazen indifference '" which was ig- 
norance, and the " boldness " which was stupidity, disappear. A 
new sensitiveness develops; shame and modesty spring up. Vul- 
garity and profanity hurt them, and they hate to be asked to speak 
of their former lives. 

Yet very little need be said to them about general morality 
and perhaps nothing at all about sex morality by the officers. The 
emphasis is to be laid on conduct and upon the Golden Rule. 
There is no need of theoretic methods or special devices, or of 
trying to find new and interesting things for the girls to do. They 
will learn the interest in necessary things. They will find out how 
to be enthusiastic over hard work and zealous in drudgery. They 
can enjoy the simple hearty pleasures which will always be possi- 
ble for them. 

Red ribbons, white ribbons, and blue ribbons are useful to 
mark three stages of effort and success. But there should be no 
separation of the best girls from the ordinary ones. They must 
all learn to live with all kinds, except the really objectionable, anti- 
social ones. These do best in a cottage by themselves until they 
learn to behave socially. 

In such a natural, wholesome life the method of discipline gen- 
erally deemed successful with boys does not succeed. Keen com- 
petition, military procedure, sharp distinctions, rough-and-ready 
kindliness seem to create a hearty, lively, untroubled life among 
boys, I believe. But keen competition commonly makes the suc- 
cessful girls conceited, and the unsuccessful lazy or discouraged- 
Military procedure fails to reach the many differing moods of 
girls, with their complex causes. Sharp distinctions outrage the 
girls' delicate perceptions, and rough and ready treatment drives 
the finer natures back upon themselves and coarsens the coarser 
natures. 

For girls are different from boys. When they go into any- 
thing they do seem to go all over. Every faculty and function is 
affected by it. Boys are complicated and discontinuous, it seems. 



DELINQUENT GIRLS 137 

Girls are intricate and intercontinuous. As one writer says, 
" men's natures are intensive, women's are extensive." Owing ap- 
parently, to the sensitive intercommunication of all parts of the 
feminine nervous system, a woman's whole nature is more com- 
pletely swayed than a man's by influential experiences. She cries 
more easily under excitement, for instance, and she loses her nerve 
in a controversy, but she has extraordinary power of personal de- 
votion. Therefore, just as she is more completely overwhelmed 
by the results of a mistaken step, so is she more completely cap- 
tured by the results of good opportunities, right acts, and purposes 
roused to excellent ends. Set a girl on the right road, get her en- 
thusiasms thoroughly enlisted toward good conduct and she adopts 
the idea complete. As they say at the New York school, " when 
she begins to go right, she goes all over." For a girl cares more 
than a boy what other people think of her, and she is very much 
more ready to shape her conduct to suit them. She is nothing 
like so constructive as a boy — she seldom has a series of inner 
impulses which engender schemes in which she is independently 
absorbed. 

For competition then, it is well to substitute a strict minimum 
standard of behavior for all, and an additional personal standard 
for each, according to her capacity for appreciation. Begin where 
each one is, and get her ambitious, if one can, to make an improve- 
ment on that. 

For military procedure one substitutes domestic system, mu- 
tual convenience and special duties for each individual suited to 
her development. To be allowed to keep a doll and care for her, 
" as long as you behave so as to be a good example to her," is a 
strong incentive to many a girl and not always to such very little 
girls either. The power of a mere voice, too, over girls is magical. 
A sincere, firm voice wins them. A hard voice sets them naughty. 
This, I fancy, is the same with boys, though scarcely to the same 
degree. 

For sharp distinctions one substitutes nice discriminations so 
far as possible, recognizing the good in opposites and rejecting the 
useless and harmful even when it is combined with top-notch at- 
tainments in special directions. 

For rough and ready kindliness one aims to substitute sympa- 
thetic recognition of personal and individual qualities and failings. 
One seeks the point of contact and starts from there. 



138 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAI, EDUCATION CONGRESS 

To enforce such discipline as this with firmness and good 
sense, avoiding the weak indetermination of sentimental sympathy, 
requires a corps of women superior in personal quality and acumen 
to anything that the girls themselves are likely ever to attain. It 
is not enough to set over them women as well-behaved and sensible 
as we expect the girls to be. They must be as well-behaved as the 
girls should desire to be, and they must be so sensible as to be able 
to disentangle problems about fitting the girls' individual natures 
to practical needs and issues, such as the girl herself could never 
work out. " He who knows A B, can teach him who knows only 
A " may be true in mechanics, but is not true in conduct. 

In the few years since the New York school was started, many 
such women have been secured who understand that most girls who 
go wrong have not chosen the way, but, being without protection, 
have wandered off, with the inevitable result; and who understand 
that sensible treatment can get them back in nearly all cases out- 
side of the few pathological ones. The work needs more and more 
such women, and it deserves the consideration of all women who 
are free to give their energies and thought and good will to a very 
interesting and satisfactory enterprise, difficult and exacting, but 
full of gratifications. It is work which a college-bred woman will 
find as interesting and important as settlement work. 

How well the method succeeds is shown by the fact that the 
upper officers and many matrons and teachers in such a school 
receive frequent letters and visits from the graduates, who look 
on the school as the best and surest thing in their lives and they 
bring their husbands when they can to see the place that did so 
much for them. The New York school knows where nine-tenths of 
its graduated girls are living, and knows that these are almost all 
doing about as well as their neighbors, while many are above the 
average. 

We are thus justified in believing that the effort to save fallen 
girls is no longer a necessary failure. Success is in a high degree 
possible. Faults can be cured and the girls can establish habits 
which make them able and glad to live the life of ordinary people. 
To send a girl to a good school during her young years is much 
better than to put her on probation in the old surroundings with 
the same inadequate parents or guardians. 

In fact the way to save a girl is in a very definite sense to 
save her from herself. First and always, guard and protect her 



THE CAMP FIEE GIRLS 1S9 

physically in her growing years — nothing can take the place of 
this. Meanwhile give her interests, occupations and ideals, ambi- 
tions and loyalties that will be worth following all her life. Then 
trust her woman's nature for the rest. Few girls so provided will 
need saving after they are twenty. In the cases where grown 
girls do " fall " in any walk of life, it is usually clear that while 
they were perhaps outwardly protected during their young years, 
yet in all the intimate ways they were neglected or misled. 



THE CAMP FIRE GIRLS AND MORAL EDUCATION 
Luther H. Gulick 

The bulk of the education that is being given to-day in the 
name of good morals seems to be based upon the assumption that 
the object to be attained is to keep people from going wrong, 
that is, to prevent evil. In others words, the present attitude of 
society toward moral health and disease is in practically the same 
phase as is its attitude toward physical health and disease. Let 
me explain what I mean. 

The old idea of medicine was the curative idea; the function 
of a physician, it was considered, began when illness set in and 
ended when the patient was able to go about his business again. 
And the study of pathologic conditions and of how diseases may 
be cured, still constitutes a large part of the work that is done 
in our medical schools. But during the last few years, society has 
begun to assume a new attitude toward disease, — medical men 
have come to realize that it is indefinitely better and more worth 
while to prevent than to cure, more to the point to see that people 
are not exposed to infection and that they have clean food and 
pure water and fresh air, than to attack smallpox and typhoid 
fever and tuberculosis after they have taken hold of the com- 
munity. 

That is called preventive medicine, and is of course a great 
advance over the curative idea. There are some of us, however, 
who feel that there is still another step to be taken. If life is 
worth living at all, it is worth living in its most vivid, most effec- 
tive, most efficient way, and does not consist merely or mainly in 
escaping disease. Yet this condition of abounding vitality is a 
comparatively rare thing; hundreds and thousands of people are 



140 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

going through life without joy or enthusiasm, not because there 
is anything really the matter with them, but because they lack 
vigor and power. When medical men take up tliis problem, when 
they get to the point of discussing how human life can be ad- 
ministered so that it will be vivid, intense, and prolonged, we shall 
have constructive medicine. 

I have gone into this at some length because it illustrates 
so well the point that I want to bring out about social work in the 
field of morals. In this field, as in that of medicine, we have 
largely outgrown the curative idea. We no longer believe that 
the whole duty of society consists in the establishment of prisons 
and reformatories, in the punishment and the reform of criminals. 
The modem view is that it is the duty of society to prevent crime. 
And in pursuance of that duty, society is now trying to do away 
with the temptation to crime as far as possible, and to make it 
hard for people to go wrong by hedging them about with all sorts 
of restrictions and regxilations and admonitions and warnings. 

This is, of course, a necessary work, and represents a great 
advance in social science. But here, too, we are beginning to see 
that preventive work alone is not enough; that as our bodily life, 
if it is really worth living, consists not merely in keeping free from 
disease, but in the joyous exercise of our powers and in the keen 
appreciation of normal, wholesome pleasures, so the life of the 
spirit must be something more vivid, more positive, than merely 
not going wrong; that while teaching people to avoid the harmful 
things in the world is all very well in its way, yet teaching them 
to love and enjoy, deeply and sincerely, the things that are right 
i\ and worth while is much more important. In short, we are be- 

I , ginning to see the need of constructive work in the way of moral 

it'i education. We have tried to meet this need in the Camp Fire Girls. 

Ij! The Camp Fire Girls is a national organization for girls which 

; is bending its energies in definite ways toward the promotion of 

;/ right living, in the positive sense of the term. It is our belief 

;' that everyday life contains so much beauty and adventure as to 

|; • be really more interesting and attractive than those evil and dan- 

gerous phases of life whose glamour of mystery and romance so 
often proves irresistibly alluring to young people. The trouble 
is that most of us do not see that everyday life is beautiful and 
, wonderful; our eyes need to be opened. And that is what the 

I ' Camp Fire movement is trying to do for girls. 



THE CAMP FIRE GIRLS 141 

The activities that we have made the basis of rank and stand- 
ing in the organization embrace the common, necessary occupa- 
tions of life, such, for instance, as washing and ironing and making 
beds, the little everyday duties that we are apt to think humdrum 
and unimportant. But in the Camp Fire organization they are not 
duties, but adventures to be undertaken with eagerness and achieve- 
ments worthy of honor. We believe that by dealing with them in 
this way, we are going to help girls to realize the essential romance 
and importance of them. 

Our aim is to make life more interesting in healthy, normal 
ways, to give an impetus toward outdoor life, toward wholesome 
entertainment, toward interest in domestic things, toward devotion 
to the home, rather than to eliminate temptation or to remove the 
possibility of evil. Briefly, we are aiming to promote the right 
rather than to prevent the wrong. 

The general plan of the organization is as follows: 

It is composed of groups of from six to twenty girls, from 
ten to twelve being the number most desirable. These groups may 
be independent or may be rxin in connection with some existing 
organization. One of our aims has been to make the organization 
so adaptable that it can be used to increase the efficience of any of 
the organizations now working with girls, — schools, clubs, settle- 
ments, playgrounds, and religious associations, whether Catholic, 
Protestant, or Hebrew. 

At the head of each group or Camp Fire is an older woman, 
officially known as the Guardian of the Fire, who is responsible 
in a general way for all the activities of the group. We believe 
that it is one of the instincts of young people to look for counsel 
and friendly guidance to older men and women whom they love and 
respect, and we have thought it wise to bring this basal human 
relationship into the Camp Fire organization. The Guardian must 
be in character, attainments, and personality a woman who is 
suitable as a leader, and before organizing a group, she must ob- 
tain a certificate of authorization from the national headquarters 
of the organization. The success of the whole movement will 
largely depend upon the zeal and enthusiasm and the personal 
influence of these Guardians of the Fire. 

We have set no definite age limit for the girls, but our aim 
has been to reach girls between the ages of twelve and twenty. 
That is the great romance period of life, when the relations to 



142 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL, EDUCATION CONGRESS 

society, to friends, to literature, to music, to love, to out-of-doors, 
are developing, when new spiritual powers, as well as new physical 
powers are coming into being, with potentialities both for good and 
for evil. 

The form of the organization, with its rituals and symbols 
and ceremonies, has been especially designed to appeal to girls of 
this age through their fundamental interests — romance and 
beauty. These symbols and ceremonies are not, however, some- 
thng that has been added to the organization simply for the pur- 
pose of making it attractive, as a sugar coating is put on a pill; on 
the contrary, they are an essential part of our plan, I might al- 
most say the essential part, since they are the means by which 
we aim to show forth the romance and beauty of the common 
things of life. 

There are three orders in the organization, besides that of 
Guardian, — Wood Gatherers, Fire Makers, and Torch Bearers. 
Any girl is eligible to the first order. We do not intend to have 
any preliminary standards that would keep girls from coming 
into the organization. We want them to come in as soon as possi- 
ble, to have the sense of belonging, the feeling " I am one." We 
have no vows or promises either, — we are rather afraid of 
those ; we have " desires " instead. To become a Wood Gatherer, 
all that a girl has to do is to appear before the Council Fire, as 
the ceremonial monthly meeting of the Camp Fire is called, and 
make the simple statement: " I desire to become a Camp Fire Girl 
and to follow the Camp Fire Law.' She must then repeat the 
Camp Fire Law, which the Guardian of the Fire has explained 
to her, phrase by phrase, somewhat as follows: 

" Seek beauty " is the first point of the Law. This means that 
the Camp Fire Girl is to demand beauty in all of life; that she 
must learn to see it and to appreciate wherever it is present, in 
nature or in people, and that where it is lacking, she must help 
to create it. She must embody it in her person, clothing, and con- 
duct, and above all, she must learn that the deepest beauty is 
within and that what she sees in the world about her is, after all, 
only a reflection of herself, 

" Give service," the second law, is spelt differently, but it 
means the same thing. Love is the beginning and the end of 
service, and love is the most beautiful thing in the world. 

" Pursue knowledge " is the third law; not necessarily book 



THE CAMP FIRE GIRLS 143 

knowledge, but knowledge as related to service, the sort of knowl- 
edge that a woman needs in order to meet efficiently and intelli- 
gently the many new demands that the world is making on women 
to-day. Women have not yet learned to meet those demands. 
That is why so many girls are working for less than a living wage ; 
that is why so many children are playing on the city streets, and 
so many babies dying for lack of proper food and care. All such 
matters are woman's business, and women must learn to deal with 
them. 

" Be trustworthy." That is another condition of service. It 
means that the Camp Fire Girl is to be loyal to others and to 
her own ideals; that she is to be dependable; that she must not 
undertake enterprises rashly, but must complete unflinchingly 
what she does undertake. 

" Hold on to health." The Camp Fire Law emphasizes this 
not so much because health is a desirable thing in itself, as be- 
cause the possession of it enables one to bring so much more vigor 
and enthusiasm to the business of living, and to take part so 
much more effectively in the work of the world. 

" Glorify work " is the sixth point of the Law. To many 
people work is mere drudgery, and many of us think of it as 
a curse laid upon man. But in reality work is one of our greatest 
blessings. Without adequate work, life is meaningless, whatever 
else it may hold; and life can never be altogether vain and empty 
while work is left. The Camp Fire Law teaches that work is 
to be dignified and glorified and done so splendidly that it shall 
be lifted from the plane of necessity to that of opportunity. 

And the last point of the Law is " Be happy." It is a solemn 
and imperative duty, being happy. Robert Louis Stevenson has 
called it " the great task of happiness." This means that the true 
source of joy, like the true source of beauty, is in the spirit; that 
happiness is an attitude of the soul. 

You will notice that there are no prohibitions in the Camp 
Fire Law; it is all positive, constructive. 

To pass on to the next rank, that of Fire Maker, a girl must 
fulfill certain requirements. These are the things that she must 
do. 

1. Help prepare and serve, together with the other candi- 
dates, at least two meals for meetings of the Camp Fire; this is 
to include purchase of food, cooking and serving the meal, and 



144 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

care of the fire. Two meals prepared in the home without advice 
or help may be substituted. 

2. Mend a pair of stockings and a knitted undergarment, 
and hem a dishtowel. 

3. Keep a written classified account of all money received 
and spent for at least one month. 

4. Tie a square knot five times in succession correctly and 
without hesitation. 

5. Sleep with open windows or out-of-doors for at least one 
month. 

6. Take an average of at least half an hour daily outdoor 
exercise for not less than a month. 

7. Refrain from candy and sodas between meals for at least 
one month. 

8. Name the chief causes of infant mortality in summer. 
Tell how and to what extent it has been reduced in one American 
community. 

9. Know what to do in the following emergencies: 

a. Clothing on fire. 

b. Person in deep water who cannot swim, both in 

summer and through ice in winter. 

c. Open cut. 

d. Frosted foot. 

e. Fainting. 

10. Know the principles of elementary bandaging and how to 
use surgeon's plaster. 

11. Know what a girl of her age needs to know about herself. 

12. Commit to memory any good poem or song not less than 
twenty-five lines in length. 

13. Know the career of some woman who has done much for 
the country or the state. 

14. Know and sing all the words of My Country 'Tis of 
Thee. 

These requirements are not, of course, in themselves, of any 
particular importance, — there is no particular significance, for 
instance, in mending one pair of stockings, — but they indicate 
what kinds of activities the Camp Fire considers important and 
worthy of honor and invest those activities with dignity and in- 
terest. 



THE CAMP FIRE GIRLS 145 

Besides fulfilling these requirements, the candidate for the 
rank of Fire Maker must present twenty elective honors from an 
extensive list. These elective honors are in seven groups, — Health 
Craft, Home Craft, Hand Craft, Camp Craft, Nature Lore, Busi- 
ness, and Patriotism. We have made them elective so that they 
will fit all sorts of conditions. Each girl is supposed to select those 
are best suited to her environment. A girl living in Switzerland 
can win an honor in Health Craft, for instance, by climbing a 
mountain, while a girl working in a factory in New York City 
can win the same kind of an honor by walldng to and from her 
work for a certain length of time. A girl who is earning her own 
living as a stenographer or a shirtwaist maker can gain credit by 
presenting work of a superior quality in her especial field. We 
believe that every phase of woman's daily life is represented in 
the activities of these seven groups. 

Of the twenty honors that must be presented for the rank of 
Fire Maker, one honor must be won in each of these groups and 
not more than five in any group except that of Home Craft. We 
have purposely made Home Craft the largest and the most im- 
portant group. The activities of the home and the relationships 
that they involve have been through all the ages the means by 
which women have acquired those domestic instinct feelings which 
are women's distinctive contribution to the world. That, I be- 
lieve, is as true to-day as it has ever been. Though most of the 
important activities of the old-time home are now carried on in 
shop and factory, and drudgery seems to be the predominant note 
of what is left, yet the fact remains that there is no way by 
which a girl may develop the spiritual attributes that are the es- 
sentials of womanhood save by means of work done in the home. 
By exalting these home activities and emphasizing their importance, 
we hope to teach girls to love them and to realize their significance 
and beauty as forms of service. 

In passing on to the rank of Torch Bearer, a girl must present 
fifteen of these elective honors in addition to those that she 
presented for the rank of Fire Maker. 

I believe that the Camp Fire Girls is going to prove effective 
in many practical ways, — I believe that it is going to make girls 
healthier and more efficient and more intelligent. But that is not 
the significant thing about it. The significant thing is that it is 
an experiment in constructive moral education, an endeavor, not 



146 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

to save girls from temptation, but to teach them to live more deeply 
and fully and joyously the everyday life of the world. 

To promote life — that should be the great aim of all human 
endeavor. That is what Christ came to do, "I came that ye might 
have life and that ye might have it more abundantly." That is 
what the Camp Fire Girls is for. 



THE PRESENT MORAL EDUCATION PROBLEM IN 
AMERICA 

Joseph Lee 

I SUPPOSE that we are successful in America in producing moral 
as well as intellectual initiative, though I much doubt whether we 
are especially strong on moral independence, which is quite a dif- 
ferent thing. What is most visible to me is a particular moral de- 
ficiency in our young people from about fourteen to twenty years 
of age. All testimony in regard to our boys and girls at this critical 
period of life is to the effect that they are, to an unprecedented 
degree, living out their own sweet will, recognizing no parental 
authority, feeling little responsibility of any sort, and, what is more 
serious, leading largely empty and dissipated lives. The sensual 
movements and degenerate songs and music that characterize much 
of the present tidal wave of dancing that is passing over us are 
single but serious instances of this evil tendency. 

The situation is aggravated by the immigration of races in 
which parental authority, once traditionally strong, and the chief 
safeguard of the young, becomes weakened in this country, partly by 
the direct influence of public scorn for the foreigner and partly by 
the fact that the children learn the language while the parents are 
still ignorant of it. Such children — especially when they become 
bread-winners, at the age of fourteen or so — often come to regard 
themselves as heads of the family and to despise their parents as 
ignorant foreigners. 

The situation, as we have it among the boys and girls walking 
the streets in the evening and going to the dance halls and picture 
shows, is that of a society, with its own manners and customs and 
its own public opinion, made up exclusively of persons from four- 



THE PRESENT MORAL EDUCATION PROBLEM 147 

teen to twenty years of age, — their ideas and views of life being 
those of a world without experience, in which parents and other 
grown people do not exist. 

Directly meeting the specific evil of ignoring both external 
authority and moral obligation, the following agencies, new and old, 
are at work: 

I. There are the churches, of which the Catholic Church in 
particular has always stood for the conviction that the child is not a 
social atom but part of the family and of some form of social whole. 

II. Among distinctively educational institutions, we have the 
kindergarten, which is based upon the philosophy of membership, 
relating the child in every way to his home, his school, his play- 
mates, society, nature and his own ideals. 

III. The modern philanthropic movement has from the very 
start (that is to say, from the formation of the first charity organ- 
ization society in 1879) recognized the truth of Emerson's saying: 
" In proportion to our relatedness we are strong." Modem charity 
has never joined in the cry of " save the children " in the sense of: — 
" treat the children as though they were social orchids, flowers 
without roots," — as though the family, the natural habitat of the 
human young, did not exist. On the contrary, modern charity, as 
we find it in America, has seen that man exists in his relations, 
especially as a member of the social whole. It has sought to 
strengthen in those whom it serves, every tie with society and their 
fellow men. It has worked to revive and vitalize the individual's 
relations to his family, to his work, to his church, his school, his 
trade organization and his friends. 

IV. The probation system for young malefactors, which in- 
cludes the Juvenile Court, and is making rapid progress in this 
country, is a recognition of the same idea. What it means in the 
main is the treating of the individual in his natural relations and 
not outside of them. Instead of first cutting every social root by 
sending him to prison and isolating him from every concrete expres- 
sion of his moral life, it leaves him in his home, at his work, among 
his friends (unless they have shown themselves a hindrance to him), 
and tries to restore his life in these relations instead of undertaking 
the impossible task of making him live outside of them. 

V. The playground and recreation movement is bent upon find- 
ing a positive and constructive (instead of a passive and destructive) 
expression of the instincts for life and beauty and upon providing 



148 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MOKAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

safe and legitimate satisfaction of the need for companionsliip of 
opposite sexes. The playground itself teaches moral relations in a 
very vivid way. The member of a football team is not learning 
about citizenship. He is experiencing it. What is happening to 
the boy is the entrance into his life of man the citizen: it is the team, 
the social whole, come to life within him and claiming his whole 
spirit as its own. The boy belongs to a football team to a more 
intense degree than he will ever belong to anything again. Boys 
have the team sense as they have the measles; only, if given proper 
scope, instead of making them immune, it makes them forever 
members, citizens. I dwell upon this influence of football and other 
team games because I believe it is a vital matter. The chicken will 
not learn to follow the hen if the " following instinct " during the 
three or four days in which it is present, is not salted down in the 
form of habit. I believe that much the same is true of the " instinct 
to belong," the parent of all law. 

VI. But everybody knows that the membership instinct, if left 
for development to play alone, will often degenerate, the boy be- 
coming a perpetual football player instead of generalizing", his team 
sense as he was meant to do. I think it is here that the Boy Scout 
idea is going to be very valuable to America. It is fortunate that 
it is coming to us from England, where the idea of subordination is 
respected more than it has been here. The specific idea for which 
the Boy Scout movement stands is that the boy between fourteen 
and twenty needs not only to live as a boy, but so far as his abilities 
go, to make good also as a man. Formerly the opportunity for ful- 
fillment in this direction was provided by co-operation with his father 
in hunting or war, in work on the farm or in the counting room or 
the workshop. Now the father goes away to work, and the boy has 
no grown up leader whom he respects nor any opportunity to take 
part in the work of the grown up world. 

I believe it is because of this lack more than any other cause 
that the lawless spirit has grown up among our boys. They are 
given no grown-up duties that are recognized and respected by 
their elders and no grown-up leadership that they can accept. We 
cannot turn back the page of history in this regard. We cannot 
put the boys back into the forest as hunters, nor to a sufficient extent 
upon the farms, nor at all into workshops where they may work in 
co-operation with their fathers. But we can find opportunity here 
and there for their doing grown-up things, A boy can give first 



THE PRESENT MORAL EDUCATION PROBLEM 149 

aid to the injured; he can pull another boy out of the water; he 
can take care of himself, at least, in the woods or on the streets, and 
can find his way about. He can even stop a runaway horse, or be 
useful in other serious emergencies ; and he can learn something at 
first hand from nature and how to speak her language. Incidentally 
to all this, he can learn the lesson specifically needed by American 
youth, namely, that obedience to legitimate orders is not disobedi- 
ence to his own soul, but a fulfillment of it. The authority that the 
boy of fourteen to eighteen instinctively recognizes is that of the 
young man who can do and be what he himself longs to do or to 
become. By restoring such leadership, the Boy Scout movement 
will do much, I think, to reassei't the principle of authority. 

VII. I believe that not only a temporary and incidental but a 
radical and lasting (though I trust not everlasting) difficulty in the 
whole situation is a result of immigration. I think the trouble with 
our young people — and our old people, too, for that matter — is 
that there is no longer a single national ideal expressed in actual 
institutions or to any very high degree capable of such expression. 

New England, before the big immigration came, had developed 
a quasi-national genius and character, which was expressed in the 
school, the church, the home, the town meeting, the college, the 
lyceum, and various minor social institutions. It is not generally 
known that Puritan New England had a richer heritage even of 
folk-games than Old England, or almost any European country. 
The existence of a true popular consciousness showed itself in the 
necessity of the war of independence and the war for freedom from 
slavery and in the literature which, before the immigration had 
wrought its effects. New England was beginning to produce. 

None of these native institutions fit our new immigrants. They 
do not belong to the New England church; their need of schooling 
is somewhat different from that of the older stock; they mostly feel 
no need of the lyceum nor of any institution to take its place; most 
of the races that cume do not starve themselves to send their sons 
to college. They have different traditions and a different tempera- 
ment, or rather several such. Theirs may be the better, but they 
are not the same. 

The result is that there is no definite, concrete public purpose 
and ideal into which young people can grow up. Whether there 
ever can be in a high degree such comtnon purpose, is a problem. 
The first step, as it seems to me, in making possible such concrete 



150 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

purpose^ and in the development of institutions to express and 
clothe it, is to stop, or greatly lessen, the present enormous influx of 
southern Europeans and Asiatics, who afford such difficult, if not 
impossible, material for assimilation. 

The existence of a concrete purpose in the mind of all the 
people, of a definite, social expectation brought insistently to bear 
upon the young, is the greatest moral asset any country can possess. 
It is, indeed, the moral possession in which all others are comprised. 
It is what England expects that makes the Englishman. It is only 
as we in America shall succeed in forming such a definite moral 
structure for Americans, in building such an edifice of expectation 
in which our young people may grow up, that we can hope to over- 
come our present difficulties. 

SOCIAL SERVICE ACTIVITIES IN CONNECTION WITH 
THE SCHOOLS 

Ella Lyman Cabot 
member massachusetts board of education 
A VAST movement of School Social Service is sweeping almost 
unrealized across the United States. In describing even a frag- 
ment of it, some sense of its magnitude and importance may be 
suggested to the reader. School Social Service is bounded on the 
north by general philanthropy and on the south by the thoroughly 
accepted functions of the public schools themselves. 

(a) School Social Service has not grown up primarily with 
the motive of relieving distress, but rather out of the perpetual 
interest of the public in children and in education. As moths fly 
to the lighted street lamp, so public interest clusters round the fas- 
cinating sight of thousands of children of all sizes and shapes troop- 
ing daily to school. The little red schoolhouse has always been a 
bright romantic spot in American history. No less so is the gigantic 
red brick schoolhouse planted spaciously in crowded sections of each 
modern city. It is the home of the spirit of youth and it calls out 
to the lovers of youth. The motive of School Social Service is in- 
deed the motive of helpfulness, but it is not only that. It is even 
more the desire to share in something perpetually interesting. We 
all want to drink of the endlessly bubbling fountain of public edu- 
cation. Thereby we renew our youth. 

(b) School Social Service must also be distinguished from the 



SOCIAIi SERVICE IN CONNECTION WITH SCHOOLS 151 

definitely accepted work of the public schools. The public school 
itself is clearly the greatest of social helpers. Imagine the schools 
of any country closed for a single year. Chaos would be upon us ! 
The help given here and there by private associations and citizens 
to the life of the school is a drop in the well-filled bucket of public 
education. Yet, for convenience sake, we must take for granted 
the defined and accepted institutions of the school and classify as 
School Social Service only those forms of helpfulness to the life of 
the pupils which lie at least in part outside the recognized domain 
of the public school. This domain indeed constantly enlarges ; the 
public school is like a great tract of solid land on the borders of a 
sandy shore. Its boundaries are distinct. Its territory is land, 
not the beach, nor the turbulent sea. Yet, year by year, seeds of 
public interest spring up on the sand. Some are blown away by 
the winds of human fickleness. Some are washed away by the over- 
whelming waves of a cleansing and destroying competition. But 
some of the seeds of public interest in school life have string roots. 
Like the blue lupin on the shores of the Pacific ocean, they take 
hold and year by year add soil to the beach. Gradually the solid 
land reaches forward to include new territory. What once was 
sandy beach becomes land. So, in educational life, much of what 
a few years ago was a vagrant, wind-blown seed of School Social 
Service is drawn into the groundwork of school-life. 

This acceptance into the public school structure of what was 
once an outside form of social service has been peculiarly marked in 
matters of health. 

Ten years ago, in the United States, medical inspection of 
schools and school nurses were isolated phenomena. You found 
them here and there in small numbers, supported often by the pri- 
vate initiative of doctors or social workers. In New York, for in- 
stance, ten years ago, the Henry St. Nurses' Settlement placed one 
of their trained nurses in a public school and helped to organize 
the System of School Nursing. Now, New York employs over a 
hundred school nurses. 

In this paper my plan is to show in what ways of social service 
citizens, through associations or individually, are serving the schools 
rather than to accent the important activities already adopted by 
School Boards themselves. I shall therefore give a relatively large 
amount to such forms of helpfulness as are still the work of devoted 
individuals and of private associations. 



152 SECOND INTERNATIONAIi MORAI/ EDUCATION CONGRESS 

The main divisions of School Social Service may be grouped 
thus : 

I. Health, including: 

Medical inspection; 
School Nurse; 
Open-air rooms; 
Dentistry ; 
Public baths; 
Anti-cigarette Leagues ; 
School Lunches ; 
Schools for Delicate Children; 
Housing conditions helped by school Visitor. 
II. Preparation for Work, including : 
Vocation Counselling; 
Industrial Schools; 
Charts of vocational opportunities ; 
Bulletins in relation to special trades; 
Classes in Commerce & Salesmanship; 
Lectures on Conditions of Success & on Business Ethics. 

III. Recreation, including : 

School Play-grounds ; 

" Gardens ; 
Swimming contests; 
Acting & Pageants; 
Educational Moving Pictures; 
Folk Dancing; 
Choral Classes; 
School Social Centers; 
Excursions to Art and Science Museums; 
Story telling; 
Music School Settlements. 

IV. Training for Citizenship, including: 
Junior Leagues ; 
School Cities ; 

Traveling Exhibit of Civic Conditions; 
Classes in The Merit System of Appointment; 
City History Club; 
Boy Scouts of America; 
American School Peace League. 



SOCIAL SERVICE IN CONNECTION WITH SCHOOLS 153 

V. Preparation for Social and Family Ties, including: 
Social Center Dances; 
Educational Moving Pictures; 
Discussions of Novels; 
Sex Education; 
Ethical Classes; 
Home-making Classes. 

THE GROWTH OF SCHOOL SOCIAL SERVICE: 

Even in its incompleteness, this list is varied indeed. In study- 
ing it you notice that School Social Service reaches out tendrils at 
first slender and easily broken, but gradually growing strong and 
wide enough to embrace the whole life of youth. 

Interest in School Social Service begins perhaps in a sporadic 
effort to decorate school rooms, or to relieve a pressing need. One 
hundred and sixty-one School Superintendents in the United States 
(out of a total of 315 listed) report that citizens have helped in 
relief of the needy.-*^ Boston has a legacy left by a public-spirited 
citizen to provide shoes for poor school children. 

Gradually, out of stray seeds of kindliness, shoot up some 
strong stems of helpfulness, and the ideal of social service concerns 
itself definitely and persistently with the whole life of the growing 
child. Thus, social service plans for the time before the child goes 
regularly to school. It initiates Kindergartens and still supports 
day nurseries. It ponders on the life of the boy and girl who leave 
school at 14 and the National Society for the Promotion of Indus- 
trial Education arises. 

Again the watchful zeal of good citizens sees the lack of 
recreation after school hours and playgrounds and social centers 
spring into being. One citizen who has not forgotten his boyhood 
enunciates the epigram: " The boy without a playground is the 
father of the man without a job "; and the winged words bear play- 
grounds over the United States as they fly. 

We can therefore best consider School Social Service as it takes 
up the different phases of Health, Vocation, Recreation, Citizen- 
ship and Family Ties of youth. 

1 See the interesting report on " Outside Cooperation with the Public 
Schools of Greater New York." Bureau of Municipal Research. New 
York. 



154 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 



School itself has always supplied conditions for learning, but 
these conditions were often physically hurtful. Children were 
crowded together with too little air, light, humidity. Their eyes 
were strained by over-use and their backs by cramped attitudes; 
a contagious disease caught by one spread almost inevitably through 
the school. 

Realizing that health goes with success in education, the School 
Boards themselves have responded quickly and generously to the 
need for medical inspection, school nurses, open-air rooms, instruc- 
tion in hygiene. Yet, still a large supplementary field is open for 
private helpfulness. 

PREVENTION OF TUBERCULOSIS: 

In New York city in 1910, the Committee on Prevention of 
Tuberculosis of the Charity Organization Society prepared and cir- 
culated an essay on : " What you should know about Tuberculosis " 
through the public schools. In Brooklyn, N. Y., a similar committee 
gives in day and evening schools one hundred lectures a year on 
tuberculosis, illustrating them with stereopticon slides. In coop- 
eration with the departments of health and of education, it main- 
tains a very original and interesting class, with two teachers, on a 
ferry-boat in the harbor. There are about 40 tubercular children 
in this class. 

Dental clinics are still largely the gift of generous societies 
and dentists. But more and more the public schools and their 
dauntless teachers are shouldering the new and exhilarating tasks 
laid upon them. Like Atlas they stand ready to carry the world. 
In Brookline, Mass., a spirited principal has so strongly urged and 
carried out the cleaning of the teeth of the school children that a 
special tooth brush is named in honor of her school. Many are the 
paths to fame ! 

SUMMER SCHOOLS FOR DELICATE CHILDREN: 

For years to come private associations will continue to take 
charge of lifting the health of children during the long summer 
vacation to its highest plane. Thus they will help the next year's 
schooling of delicate children. 

In Boston a group of two hundred children carefully chosen as 



SOCIAL SERVICE IN CONNECTION WITH SCHOOLS 155 

delicate and needing refreshment have been taken each day for six 
weeks during July and August to an island in the harbor. The 
children are selected by school nurses and by social workers and the 
work is supervised by Dr. Harrington, Director of Hygiene of the 
Boston Public Schools, but paid for and run entirely by a depart- 
ment of the Women's Municipal League. Special cars and a boat 
take the children to the island. They are given nourishing food; 
they play games, learn simple folk dances, hear delightful story 
telling, and during the afternoon are taught to take a nap, it being 
often pathetically evident that these little people are starved for 
sleep. 

IMPROVING HOUSING CONDITIONS: i 

Still another form of work for the health of school children, 
the improvement of their housing conditions, is accomplished by 
the Home and School Visitor, or, as she is called in New York, the 
Visiting Teacher. This work is still supported, with a single ex- 
ception, by private societies. It is carried on in Boston, Providence, 
New York, Worcester, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Chicago. One 
or two examples will show how the Home and School Visitor affects 
housing conditions. One of the Home and School Visitors worked 
almost entirely in a very poor quarter of Boston, inhabited largely 
by Italians and Russian Jews. The Visitor calls each day at the 
public school and is given a number of cards bearing the names and 
addresses of children about whom the teacher is troubled, together 
with a short statement of the difficulty. Armed with this card, the 
visitor goes to the house of the parents and talks the matter over 
carefully with the mother, often returning in the evening to see the 
father. 

Last year, one boy of twelve years was reported as doing poorly 
in his school work and as staying out late at night. He was only 
in the fourth grade and seemed stolid, indifferent, and taciturn. 
Miss B. visited the house and found a four-room tenement in which 
not only the family but in addition sixteen boarders slept. This 
overcrowding was clearly illegal, and at Miss B.'s request, the 
city Board of Health interfered and the boarders left. The boy, 
relieved of the strain of uncomfortable home conditions, became 
happy and regular in his school work. 

Louis, whose teacher reported him for uncleanliness, was found 
living alone with his father in the dressing-room of a Turkish bath 



156 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

establishment. His mother was dead^ his father drank and this 
was his only home. After school and even, through the evening, 
Louis worked, peddling fruit. He earned about $2 a week, but 
even this was not his own. He had to give it to his father. 

The school visitor protested against the dirty room and the 
father agreed to move. He did indeed, but only to a worse place, 
a cold, dark, basement room 4x8 ft. in the rear of a tailor shop. 
There was no furniture in the room except a table, a small oil 
stove and a heap of dirty clothes for a bed. 

Undaunted by her former failure, the School Visitor again 
expostulated, plead, and threatened with all the resources at her 
command. 

She came; she saw; she conquered. The father was persuaded 
to move, not only to a clean house, but to one where a motherly 
woman took charge of Louis. His personal appearance and his 
standing in school have steadily improved since this time. 

II. PREPAnATION FOR WORK : 

I have space here only to speak of one or two interesting 
phases of cooperation of private associations with the public schools 
in the matter of vocational guidance. 

Vocational guidance was started on a definite plan in Boston 
in 1907, under a man of genius. Dr. Frank Parsons, who organized 
a bureau for the purpose of advising young men in their choice of 
work. Dr. Parsons died suddenly, a few years later, but his work 
has been continued and his book, " The Choice of a Career " re- 
mains as stimulating reading. Since the Reorganization of the 
Vocation Bureau in 1909 the relation to public school pupils has 
become very intimate. The Bureau issues pamphlets on leading 
industries, giving the physical conditions, the skill needed, the pay, 
the chance of advancement. Over 100 industries, including for 
example, the shoemaker's, the machinist's, the baker's, the archi- 
tect's have been thus investigated and described. The Vocation 
Bureau works directly with the public schools through a Committee 
on Vocational Direction made up of teachers and appointed by the 
School Board. Mass meetings are held to interest parents and 
teachers and in each school a vocational counsellor gives advice to 
the children who are leaving school. 

In the case of girls, similar work is done by the Girls' Trade 
Education League. It makes a careful study of the business op- 



SOCIAL SERVICE IN CONNECTION WITH SCHOOLS 157 

portunities open to girls between the ages of 14 and IS. The 
League tries to hold girls from falling haphazard into the nearest 
niche of work regardless of their own fitness or the future before 
them. 

The League makes a careful investigation of all occupations in 
which young girls are employed, the wages, the moral and sanitary 
conditions, the character of the work, the possibility of advance, 
and also of the qualities of mind and body that the girl needs to 
do her work well. 

Take for example the subject of millinery: a short pamphlet 
published by the League gives any girl the chance to know the 
processes of the work from making bands and linings to the final 
trimming. The bulletin tells her the pay in different parts of the 
work from the assistant helper at from $3 to $6 a week to the trim- 
mer who rises to $25 a week. It warns her that the disadvantage 
in millinery is that the trade season is short, and advises her to 
find chances for other employment during the dull seasons, as in 
the stores at Christmas time, when the world is too busy to buy hats. 

The pamphlet then tells the girls where they can best learn 
the trade and suggests the qualifications needed. She requires good 
eyesight, endurance and ability to use her fingers quickly. She 
must have dry and deft hands. It will be good if she is interested 
in the people to whom she sells her goods; it is essential that she 
should like to sew and to combine colors. 

A DIRECTORY OF VOCATIONAL SCHOOLS: 

Preparation for work has many aspects. One bit of guidance 
has been the special interest of the Committee on Vocational Oppor- 
tunities of the Women's Municipal League of Boston. This Com- 
mittee has made charts showing the work of over 200 of the best 
of the vocational schools accessible to Boston. 

Boys and girls leaving the regular school course are often 
discouraged from taking industrial or professional training by not 
knowing where to go, or what the cost and the outcome will be. 
Just as the Girls' Trade Education League gives information con- 
cerning the actual trades, so the Women's Municipal League offers 
direct help in relation to opportunities for trade training. It in- 
cludes one special feature. It publishes a full and interesting list 
of the educational and industrial opportunities for the physically 
handicapped. To this special chart the League adds its word of 
good cheer: 



158 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

" Below are listed some of the schools that take away the handicaps 
from children and give them chances to be happy and useful citizens." 

Schools for the Blind, Deaf and Crippled are on tfhis list and, as 
on the other charts, the headings cover the name and address of 
each school, its purpose, subjects taught, special features, require- 
ments for admission, cost, season and length of courses and the 
placing of graduates. 

Outside of special Schools for the Handicapped, the schools 
listed include Industrial, Commercial, Continuation, Professional, 
Art and Music Schools, and the training in Settlement classes. A 
richly varied outlook is suggested for choice. There are excellent 
schools listed for dressmaking, millinery, stenography, automobil- 
ing, teaching, nursing, engineering, pottery making, watch making, 
drawing, music, telegraphy, piano tuning, printing and many other 
subjects. 

The work of the Vocation Bureau, the Girls' Trade Educa- 
tion League and of the Women's Municipal League shows great 
thoroughness and definiteness of plan and method. All illustrate 
how valuable to the public schools may be trained and earnest asso- 
ciations of volunteers. The school authorities of Boston are in 
closest touch with all three organizations. 

III. RECREATION : 

The wave of the spirit of Play has swept over America and 
inundated the public schools, drawing into its current the streams 
of playgrounds, athletic games, gardening, drama and pageant, 
choral classes and folk dancing; it is flooding the whole life of the 
child from the kindergarten to the professional school. As in the 
case of efforts to improve health, much of the recreation movement 
has been initiated or very swiftly adopted by the public school itself. 

soGiAL centers: 

I will speak here of just one experiment among many wholly 
initiated and run by a private association but adopted after a year's 
trial by the city schools. In October, 1911, the Committee on the 
Extended Use of School Buildings of the Women's Municipal 
League of Boston started a social center in the East Boston High 
School. The Boston School Board gave the use of the building, 
heating, light; the Committee paid the janitor's fee and all other 
expenses. The League Committee looked all over the country for 
directors with the right social ideals and training for just this work 



SOCIAL SERVICE IN CONNECTION WITH SCHOOLS 159 

and finally secured Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Hawley of Michigan. 
They spent the Summer in getting to know the neighborhood. 
They lived very near the High School and constantly invited boys 
and girls to their apartment. Mr. Hawley made inquiries about 
the musical talent of the neighborhood, and when the Social Center 
opened in the autumn he was able to secure strong musical Clubs: 
— two Glee Clubs, one of young women and one of young men, 
one for beginners and one advanced enough to give entertainments, 
a drum corps of lads from 14 to 16 years old and a brass band of 
18 instruments. 

The initiative of the musical clubs was felt in every part of 
the Social Center; they formed a natural nucleus ready organized 
at the outset. During the autumn a girls' folk dancing class of 
70 with a trained teacher, a young men's athletic club, and two 
dramatic clubs were organized. The girls were given two classes, 
one in plain and one in decorative sewing, and 30 of the younger 
girls were taught games, stories and songs, paper-cutting, brass 
work and hammock-making such as they might use in positions on 
playgrounds or in vacation schools. 

All the members think of these Clubs as their own; they con- 
tribute weekly dues ; they pay by installment for the musical instru- 
ments and the sewing materials. The spirit is that not of classes 
but of clubs — clubs each with a responsible President and Treas- 
urer, — a constitution and rules. The East Boston Center has 
proved so successful that the School Board this spring adopted both 
its policy and its Director and plans to run four of a similar char- 
acter in diiferent parts of the city next year. 

IV. TRAINING FOR CITIZENSHIP: 

Here as in the realms of health, vocation and recreation, public 
spirited people have come forward, bearing in one hand a plan to 
develop citizenship and in the other funds to carry it forward. 

Two of these plans the City History Club and the diflPerent 
forms of school cities or systems of miniature self-government for 
children have made a deep dent in education. 

CITY HISTORY CLUB: 

The City History Club of New York has been in existence 
eleven years and estimates its enrollment during that time as 15,000 



160 SECOND INTERNATIONAIi MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

children. It gives classes in civics, takes children on excursions to 
places of historic interest and plans debates on important questions 
of the day. The City History Club is now preparing a syllabus of 
the government of New York city for teachers. 

SCHOOI/ CITIES AND JUNIOR LEAGUES: 

The School City planned by Mr. Wilson L. Gill and its 
allies, the Civic Leagues for young people, are more and more asso- 
ciated directly with the public schools themselves. All are planned 
to give the children a genuine though minute understanding of the 
meaning of citizenship through a sample of the experience itself. 

It is interesting to see Mr. Gill organize, with the teacher's 
approval, a group even of second year school children into a little 
city. The children elect mayor, aldermen, and common council 
and police from their midst and accept the very limited but definite 
duties of seeing that neatness, order and cleanliness (papers are 
picked up, banana peels kept oif the sidewalks), and quiet are kept 
in the school. 

EXHIBITS OF CITY CONDITIONS: 

Another stimulus to good citizenship is given by the Traveling 
Exhibit of the Women's Municipal League of Boston. This exhibit 
easily occupies a good sized school hall. Its method might be 
called the Contrast of Good and Evil. 

There is exhibited a delightfully clean market stall, all the 
food under glass or covered with netting; in contrast, next to it, 
is a dirty market stall; wilted lettuce, half melted candy, metallic 
flies stuck by pins on to the cakes cry out against the evil state. 
The same exhibit gives parallel types of sanitary and unsanitary 
tenements, milk supplies, street conditions, garbage cans, and 
graphic representations of conditions conducive to tuberculosis and 
typhoid fever. This exhibit is sent from school to school with the 
consent of each principal. It remains two weeks in each school 
and during that time groups of children are gathered in just after 
school hours to have it explained to them. In the poorer districts 
of Boston the children are often the buyers of the family food, and 
in a number of cases, they've gone out and urged their marketmen 
to make their markets nearer the ideal of that of the good market 
of the Women's Mimicipal League. 



SOCIAL SERVICE IN CONNECTION WITH SCHOOLS 161 

V. PREPARATION FOR FAMILY TIES: 

Guidance of boys and girls in the formation of the best ties 
toward one another — ties that will prepare the way for an honor- 
able family life in the future — is the greatest service to society 
that is within the gift of man. 

Like all moral education, the education for ties of family and 
friendship grows primarily through the contagion of personality 
and not through direct instruction. Parents, teachers, friends 
within one's sight and comrades through the long path of history, 
help us already more than we can ever tell. But, within the last 
ten years, the schools, feeling almost overwhelmingly the need of 
all resources in meeting this intricate problem, have called for help. 

I can suggest here only a few skillful methods already begun 
by those who wish to help the school, 

(a) Teaching. Among the best teaching for school boys and 
girls I place that of Miss Anna Garrett of New York. 

She is giving herself liberally to help teachers, parents and 
children, and her teaching has the qualities of unconsciousness, 
geniality, variety, picturesqueness, humor (often forgotten as essen- 
tial in the earnest presentation of any difficult topic). 

Apart from teaching, a number of movements still in their in- 
fancy promise help. 

(&) Home and School Associations. The close association 
of parents with teachers in social meetings, and in talks on work 
for their children, will lead naturally and in some cases most ef- 
fectively to helpful understanding and joint effort. 

(c) Social Life in School Buildings. A number of private 
societies are preparing boys and girls for better ties of friendship 
and aifection by bringing them together in the school buildings for 
dances, choral singing, theatricals. Girls and boys of 14 and 15 
just out of school or at work in stores and factories are hungry for 
society. It must be given them in the best way and under guidance. 
The Opportunity Clubs in the East Boston High School last winter 
gave several dances. These were well managed by an alert Com- 
mittee of Club members. All who saw the large gymnasium full of 
happy and orderly young men and women must have felt the value 
of opening school houses in neighborhoods where there is no other 
meeting place but the street or the public dances. One young man 
told the Committee on Extended Use of School Buildings that was 
rimning those dances that it was the only place he had made the 



162 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

right kind of friends since leaving school. The success of dances 
and entertainments in bringing out the best in boys and girls in 
their relation to one another will be due first of all to the standards 
of the leaders. Good is contagious and will prevail. 

(d) The experiment has quietly been tried by one worker 
of the Children's Aid Society of a course in novels. She took inter- 
esting novels that gave opportunity for the discussion of the ties 
between men and women and talked them over with a small group 
of girls. Her experience led her to believe that this method is 
one of real value. Biography too is a largely untilled field in which 
lie the seeds of human experience in love and marriage. For those 
who do not easily read, story-telling and the vivid scenes of the 
educational pictures of the biograph offer a wonderful chance for 
bringing home of experience that is ardent and ennobling. We 
are not yet using the resources of modern invention for the greatest 
educational ends, but they lie within the grasp of the genius who 
will see and devise their uses in moral training. Already Enoch 
Arden touches many a sight-seer in the commercial Moving Picture 
shows. Will not someone take a few of the moving dramas of 
loyalty, devotion, self-control between men and women, and make 
them available to fire the boys and girls of our nation with stand- 
ards of reverence and honor? 

Out of the many forms of social service activities in connec- 
tion with schools, I have chosen a few, but even these few show a 
vast stream of civic energy flowing to help the public schools and 
ready to be curbed and directed. This great stream of public 
interest in the schools is one of the most hopeful signs in modern 
life. The schools no longer stand alone or at one side of the 
current. They are in the center of public interest; they are linked 
to private associations of every kind. The good-will of the people 
bears them aloft. 

MORAL PROTECTION AS RELATED TO MORAL EDU- 
CATION. 

Anna Garlin Spencer 

Says Rousseau: " The first art of education consists neither 
in teaching virtue nor truth, but in guarding the heart from evil 
and the mind from error." Accepting that principle, we have come 
to look upon all agencies which aim to protect the child from vicious 



MORAL PROTECTION 163 

surroundings in the home or in the street as a vital part of child- 
care, and to consider all safeguarding of amusement and all purify- 
ing of the public atmosphere to which the young are subjected as 
essential elements of character building. If, as President Butler 
says, " education is a process in the spiritual evolution of the race " 
there must be for each individual a steady, persistent, development 
of the whole personality and no violent and revolutionary changes 
from evil to good, from error to truth. An evolutionary process 
of this sort can only be secured at the initial cost of moral and 
mental protection such as Rousseau indicates. 

More than this is true; — by reason of increased study of the 
vital relationship between the physical, the mental and the moral 
nature, we have come to a point where we place the health and 
strength of the body at the bottom of the educational stairway 
which leads to spiritual excellence. We are prepared to go further 
than Rousseau, and to say that the first art of education consists 
neither in formal instruction nor in definite mental and moral safe- 
guarding, but in the up-building of bone and muscle, nerve and 
tissue, to secure sound flesh, pure blood, and a strong body as a 
basis for that sane mind and that healthy energy which are the 
raw material of character. We are therefore reaching back in our 
pedagogy to the physical basis of the intellectual and moral life; 
and this leads us from the School to the Nursery. And since the 
nursery registers not only the conditions of the new life just enter- 
ing the race but also the status of the lives responsible for its con- 
ditions, educational science is leading us back from the child to 
the parent and to the potentisil parent, in the effort to prepare the 
child for the world and to improve the world for the child. We 
seem at last to attempt to act upon the hint given us by Emerson 
when he said: " If you want to reform a man you must begin with 
his grandfather." We are trying to catch the grandfathers young, 
and make them such as their grandchildren would choose they 
should be. If the process is a bit hard upon the actual grand- 
parents and nearer fathers and mothers of these prospective an- 
cestors, — and it surely is in many cases, — so much the worse for 
inheritance we say, and so much the better for eugenics ! 

Dr. Wendell Holmes declared that " most diseases, except old 
age, are curable, but often the Doctor has to be called two or 
three generations before the patient is born." We are now calling 
the doctor for the youngest children, not only for their benefit 



16i SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

but to increase the vitality and the vigor of the race. Moral pro- 
tection therefore includes such physical care, nourishment and 
training as will give a sound body, if heredity has made that possi- 
ble; such mental safeguarding and development as will give a 
sound mind, if nature has not left the infant " unfinished " at 
birth; and such moral atmosphere and incentive as will give right 
tendencies to the budding life. 

From the point of view of radical prevention of social ills, the 
foremost agencies are those which aim to place all defective chil- 
dren under special care, segregated from the life of the normal for 
which they are unfitted in proportion as they are abnormal, and 
shielded by institutional environment suited to conserve such slight 
power as they may already possess. The chief teacher of this so- 
cial duty of permanent custodial care of the feebleminded and the 
protection of society against their marriage and parenthood, is the 
National Conference of Charities and Corrections, which has stood 
for this principle for many years. Yet, to the shame of the people 
of the United States it must be confessed that the vast majority 
of the defective are still left to be exploited by the forces of lust 
and of greed, and to burden society with offspring like themselves 
incompetent to meet life's demands. 

Moral protection as related to moral education demands, if 
it is to be effective, first of all that we prevent this tainting of 
the blood of the nation. This one social reform would of itself 
clear the ground in school and home, in community and political 
life, in courts and prisons, for a more vital and effective moral edu- 
cation; for it would remove to society's hospitals those who cannot 
profit by society's training places. Recognizing this relationship 
between feeblemindedness and crime, vice and misery of every sort, 
some of the States of our Union have adopted laws leading toward 
the " sterilization of the unfit " as an additional, or even in many 
cases a substitute, form of protection of family life against the 
taint of the imbecile. These laws are increasingly approved and 
adopted; but so far do not offer at best anything but a supple- 
mentary form of social protection and are difficult to enforce in 
many cases which most of all require segregation. 

After the babies, of whatever sort they may be, are really here, 
there are many forms of social care which offer assistance to the 
mother and the child in building up the physical, mental and moral 
nature. There are first, agencies for the physical succor and aid 



MORAL PROTECTION 165 

of mothers too poor to receive proper care and nourishment from 
their own family provision; societies which aim to assist the more 
burdened and also the less competent mothers to do the right thing 
for the child. These extend their help from charitable relief in 
the home, where the pregnant woman or nursing mother is underfed 
and ill, to the fresh-air work for mothers and babies who can keep 
fairly well if given an occasional taste of country air. The ac- 
tivities of these societies comprise " Hospital Schools of Infant 
Care," which are attachments to hospitals where the mother or 
care-taker of the child may take an infant to be examined, to 
have its proper food prescribed, its needed protection from in- 
herited weakness or defect outlined, and where all forms of aid 
may be supplied, if private means are too limited. Also, at such 
centers of teaching and of help the advantages of breast-feeding 
are explained, and mothers shown how to keep up a healthy milk 
supply, and aided to the hyper-nourishment often required for that 
purpose. 

Second : — The Visiting Nursing Associations, scattered all over 
the United States and found in nearly every large city, aim to do 
for the poorer families in their homes as much of that service which 
the private nurse gives to the family of the well-to-do as necessarily 
hurried visits, divided between the tenements of a large area, allow. 
The Visiting Nurse is especially close to the mental and moral at- 
mosphere surrounding the baby. As she performs the physical 
services that make the mother or the child so comfortable and so 
grateful, she can and does give the most potent lessons in the 
value of good temper, good sense and judgment, a pleasant voice 
and a gentle manner. Every observing dispenser of material relief 
comes to recognize the difference, in more than physical comfort 
and easy recovery from disease, of those families in which a kindly 
and wise district nurse has impressed herself upon the home life. 

Third: — There are the associations of varied names and spe- 
cial objects which are working in many centers of social service in 
the United States for the prevention of blindness, for the special 
relief and cure of the crippled, for the aid of the anaemic and tuber- 
culous, for the upbuilding of the weak and for the special educa- 
tion of the slightly abnormal children. 

Fourth: — The Day Nurseries form a very important group in 
this manifold effort. Whatever else is tried, or allowed, babies 
must not be left uncared for while the mother works outside the 



166 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL, EDUCATION CONGRESS 

home. Hence the large work of the Day Nurseries, which care for 
over seventeen thousand children in the United States as repre- 
sented in the work of the Federation of these agencies; while many 
of the Nurseries, not so federated and little reported upon to the 
public, care for another unknown but considerable body of little 
children. The average number of children in each of the more 
than four hundred Day Nurseries reported in a recent publication 
of this national Federation, is from twenty-five to one hundred and 
seventy-five, about one-fourth of them under two years of age and 
a considerable minority infants of days or weeks or months. The 
age of admission ranges from six days to two years and the age 
beyond which the ministrations of the Nursery are withheld from 
five to seven years. The literature published by the Federation 
of Day Nurseries shows that the movement is highly educational; 
ranging from instruction, both written and oral, and largely the 
latter, in proper dietaries and ways of bathing, etc., to such coun- 
sel as " how to make the baby mind without spanking him," and 
" how to make the baby happy and well at the same time." So 
valuable is the teaching which the trained nurse in charge of such 
a Nursery often gives to the mothers of her neighborhood that many 
persons deeply interested in the home and its most important product 
the child, wish that the Day Nursery could be emancipated from 
its exclusively philanthropic ideal, and become a recognized center 
of instruction and help for all the mothers who need for them- 
selves or for their children a few hours relief each day from the 
personal care of the baby; and that the use of such an educational 
center for a small portion of each day by the less poverty-bound, 
would take from it the sting of " charity." These observers also 
wish that charity itself would see that it is not right to keep any 
mother and her baby separated for a full working day of nine, ten 
or twelve hours, even if the " Nursery is better than the home," and 
even if the mother is widowed, deserted or in extreme poverty. 
The Day Nursery, as it might be, would be one of the finest aids 
to moral protection and one of the best starting points in moral 
education that modern society could devise. 

Fifth: — In 1897, the Congress of Mothers was established by 
Mrs. Theodore W. Birney of Washington, D. C. This has be- 
come a great national institute, with triennial sessions of the whole 
body, with State branches throughout the Union, and with a vast 
number of local groups auxiliary, or fraternally cooperating. 



MORAL PROTECTION 167- 

" Mothers' meeting," " Mothers' Councils/' " Mothers' Clubs/' 
" Fathers' Clubs " (a few) " Parent and Teachers' Associations/' 
and many more names of local auxiliaries show the varied begin- 
nings of this one movement to link the home and the school together 
and to link all the homes together, in a more complete and in- 
telligent devotion to the interests of the child. Parenthood is 
the unique moral discipline of the race. The most careless and the 
most shallow respond in some measure to the demands of this 
school of experience and try in some poor fashion to accept and 
fulfill the responsibilities involved. The groups of mothers and of 
parents, therefore, who study with the teachers how to make social 
conditions better and how to do their personal duty more effec- 
tively for the highest ends of character development in the chil- 
dren, show a moral earnestness which is to be seen in like measure 
in no other groups of students. A few societies of this type, but not 
an organic part of the Mothers' Congress, and often taking a more 
definitely educational name like " Child Study Class," show more 
serious and elaborate programs, but not more intense desire to 
learn. The Mothers' Congress publishes a monthly " Child Wel- 
fare Magazine," and issues for loaning sets of valuable papers by 
physicians, teachers and social workers, which bring to solitary 
mothers in remote country districts the fresh thought of the world 
on vital topics of home life. This organization called together 
the first International Congress on Child Welfare held in the 
United States, which was opened by an address by President 
Roosevelt, and addressed by many distinguished official delegates 
from several countries, as well as by experts on special topics from 
the United States. 

Sixth : — An enterprise approaching the work of this organiza- 
tion more specifically by means of the printed word and through 
reading-clubs and correspondence, is the " After School Club of 
America." It aims to make the average, not very well-trained, 
parent more fit to use his or her influence in the hours when the 
child is not in school. A " Mothers' Book " which includes a 
chart of appropriate studies for different years, gives the basis of 
the instruction and suggestion which is offered to the home; and 
great emphasis is laid upon moral protection and culture. The 
rapid growth of this agency is a hopeful sign that average Ameri- 
can parenthood is neither careless of its duty nor ignorant of its 
need of instruction. 



168 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

Seventh: — " Child Welfare Exhibits " have been instituted and 
held in many cities of the United States in which, by means of 
charts, graphic illustrations, the stereopticon and all sorts of visual 
teaching, explained by expert lecturers, the actual conditions sur- 
rounding child life have been presented, and the ideal conditions 
suggested, to vast audiences reaching into the hundreds of thou- 
sands. " A Child Welfare Committee," with headquarters in New 
York City, oifers a wide range of important material for loaning 
in aid of these Exhibits which are rapidly forming elements of 
instruction and interest at State and County Agricultural Fairs, 
and in connection with Municipal Budget Exhibits and the like. 

Eighth: — There are seven great "Foundations," or philan- 
thropic and educational " trusts," in the United States which deal 
more or less specifically with moral protection and moral educa- 
tion. "The Peabody Educational Fund;" the "John F. Slater 
Fund " for the education of " Freedmen and colored children; the 
" Carnegie Institution at Washington," which oiFers to advanced 
students special opportunities of research; the " General Education 
Board" which has the suport of Mr. Rockefeller; the "Carnegie 
Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching; the " Russell Sage 
Foundation," and the " Anna T. Jeanes Foundation." Of these 
great institutions for the improvement of social life, the Sage 
Foundation makes perhaps the most definite provision for moral 
protection and moral education. Its " Department of Child 
Hygiene " (Dr. Luther H. Gulick, Director) was established to 
" promote activities favorable to the physical, moral and intellectual 
welfare of children, through research, publication and organiza- 
tion." It has two divisions, that of Recreation and that of Edu- 
cation. The problem of moral protection of the city child in his 
hours of recreation includes finding or making a place for his play 
(or the " Playground Movement," as it is called in the United 
States), and then providing suitable supervision, equipment and 
suggestive aid to the best use of the play-place and the play-hour. 
The educational work of the Department of Child Hygiene of this 
Foundation includes a study of the problems connected with " back- 
wardness " among school children, and the " reasons why so many 
children drop out of school before the end of the elementary 
course." These two divisions of work are vitally connected with 
moral protection and moral guidance and reach back to the home 
and the conditions of infant life itself. Another department of 



MORAL PROTECTION 169 

this Foundation, that of Child-Saving, directs its efforts toward 
standardizing and making more eifeetive for the best physical, men- 
tal and moral development the care of those children who, orphaned, 
half-orphaned, deserted or defective in special sense or in mental 
endowment, need nurture either in institutions or in foster homes. 
This department, under the leadership of Dr. Hastings H. Hart, 
is carrying a message of instruction and of practical help to every 
part of the United States. The Sage Foundation, which has the 
benefit of expert guidance in all its general and special work, has 
for its general object " The improvement of social and living con- 
ditions in the United States " ; and its ten million dollar endowment 
by Mrs. Russell Sage enables it to do a unique work under the 
leadership of its general director, Mr. John M. Glenn. The 
dangers inherent in such self-appointed, self-perpetuating and self- 
supervised Foundations, with the vast amounts of money repre- 
sented in them in the United States are not yet in evidence in our 
country and perhaps may be averted in the future. The present 
need in America is for competent and recognized leadership, having 
sufficient funds at command to make that leadership felt strongly 
in right directions. Hence, for the present stage of social progress 
in the United States at least, we are grateful for the aid of these 
philanthropic deposits of the fruits of the power of money kings. 

Ninth : On the opposite side of social activity we have in 

the United States an institution most flexible in administration, most 
susceptible to change in aim and activity, most free of domination 
by the " consensus of the competent," and most quickly responsive 
to waves of social influence, namely, the Woman's Club Movement. 
The " General Federation of Woman's Clubs," meeting biennially, 
represents more than a million women, organized in state branches, 
and local clubs. They are for the most part the better to do, the 
more intelligent and public-spirited, of the house-mothers of 
the United States. The departments of Civics, Household Eco- 
nomics, Public Health, and Education, all deal directly and in 
many cases of local activity most effectively, with the problems of 
social condition which affect the child. The last report showed 
that of the Clubs composing the national body nearly four hundred 
had established local study of home economics on a plan of vital ad- 
vantage in the care of children, and more than two hundred and 
fifty clubs had aided in introducing such study into the public 
schools, in many cases paying by private contributions for the ex- 



170 SECOND INTEKNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

pense involved until the tax payers were ready to incorporate the 
courses in the regular school provision. These devotees of House- 
hold Economics have based their activities on the conviction that 
of the ten billion dollars spent annually for food^ shelter and cloth- 
ing in the United States much is wasted, and more ineffectively 
used by reason of the ignorance of the house-mother and the lack 
of training of girls for home obligations. One result of this ac- 
tivity of the Women's Clubs has been the largely increased intro- 
duction of courses of study along this line in the Colleges and 
Universities attended by young women, and to the force of their 
appeals in this direction has recently been added a strong endorse- 
ment of such courses of study in institutions of higher learning by 
the " Association of Collegiate Alumnae " which gives academic 
backing to this demand of the experienced house-mothers in club- 
life assembled. 

The educational department of the General Federation of 
Women's Clubs, together with its Home and Traveling Library sec- 
tions, has done valiant service for the children of the country, 
especially in rural districts. Its five points of educational doc- 
trine, stated first by a teacher of wide experience and great in- 
fluence, have become the slogan of educational advance throughout 
the Union. These five points are: 1. Strong and well-enforced 
child-labor and compulsory education laws in every State. 2. A 
sufficient number of well-equipped and well-cared-for school houses 
in every community. 3. A properly trained and properly paid 
teaching force. 4. Expert paid supervision of all school work. 
5. Training for the hand, and moral instruction in all public 
schools. These points, combined in the general aim to " give all 
children in the United States equal educational opportunity " con- 
stitute a noble educational creed. As a result over one thousand 
towns and cities in the United States show by the last Federation 
Report marked and definite improvement in some one of the points 
of this minimum demand in tax-supported schools. 

Tenth : — The National Child Labor Committee is a compact 
organization having large financial and moral support and many 
subsidiary and local branches. It has consolidated, strengthened 
and effectively directed the public conscience and intelligence to 
the protection of children against premature wage-earning. There 
is no condition of child life in which the physical nature is more 
weakened and the moral nature more exposed, and the power to 



MORAL PROTECTION 171 

study and to appropriate the wisdom of the world more invaded, 
than in the monotonous machine-dominated industry of modern life. 
Such a national body, assisted by the State branches and the local 
clubs, and the numberless small child labor committees attached to 
clubs, churches, settlements and charitable societies does a work 
in defending the rights of children to " life, liberty and the pursuit 
of happiness " that cannot be overestimated. Said Comenius : " All 
men require education and God has made children unfit for other 
employment in order that they may have leisure to learn." The 
present strong tendency in all the States not having already at- 
tained that standard to fix the legal age of the working child at 
fourteen years is largely the result of eifort by the various child 
labor committees. 

Eleventh: — The Consumers' Leagues, national and local, have 
contributed a vast and efficient network of moral protection by 
awakening the conscience of the purchasing public, by organizing 
it and focusing its energy upon securing a guarantee that articles 
bought shall be made and sold under right conditions. The work 
of this organization against child labor, against the industrial ex- 
ploitation of motherhood and of potential motherhood, against the 
physical and moral exposures of the street for boys in the mes- 
senger service and in newspaper distribution, the splendidly able 
manner in which it has gathered and desseminated information in 
lines not otherwise availble to the general reader, have marked this 
organization (founded by Josephine Shaw Lowell, and served so 
signally by Mrs. Frederick Nathan and Mrs. Florence Kelly), as 
second to none in the service of the ignorant, the weak and the 
poor. 

Child Welfare Leagues are also found in many parts of the 
United States notably in New York City; and attached to various 
organizations. These link together health, freedom from prema- 
ture wage-earning, industrial training, proper recreation and moral 
education as objects of their devotion to the wellbeing of the chil- 
dren. Some of these Leagues are adding a department of Eugenics 
as the fundamental basis of their work. 

Among the most vital of the organizations definitely engaged 
in the prevention of exploitation of childhood are the nearly three 
hundred and fifty Humane Societies of the United States which 
aim to protect children from abuse and cruelty of every kind. A 
few of these societies are solely devoted to the " Prevention of 



172 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

Cruelty to Children," among them the pioneer S. P. C. C. of New 
York, founded by Henry Bergh in 1874. The majority, however, 
are organized for the protection of both animals and children. 
The number of cruel parents and legal guardians prosecuted and 
punished by means of these societies and the number of abused 
children, over 50,000 handled by the New York Society alone, 
testifies alike to the energy and necessity for these societiies and 
also to the need for growing better fathers and mothers. The 
seven important Humane Education Societies in the United States 
are working toward that end. 

Twelfth: — In the field of juvenile delinquency much is being 
done to protect the youthful wrong-doer from evil associations and 
to check his wrong-doing. The establishment of a special " private 
hearing for juvenile delinquents " in the Courts of Boston, Massa- 
chusetts in 1869, and the establishment of an entirely distinct and 
independent " Children's Court " in Chicago, Illinois, in 1899, 
mark the beginning of a new era in the social treatment of way- 
ward children and youth. To keep the child, and first offender 
still youthful and presumably amenable to reformatory effort, as 
far away as possible from jail and prison and the chance associa- 
tion of the court-room with mature criminals, is the man object 
of this new way of dealing with wayward boys and girls. The 
probation system established in Boston, in 1878, is now the rule in 
all the more enlightened communities of the United States. It puts 
the wayward child under the strict but humane care of the court, and 
in personal charge of some interested man or woman. It includes 
an attention to truant and " delinquent " parents, which keeps them 
to their duty by an external conscience and a wise social control. 
If the youthful offender must suffer punishment in a penal institu- 
tion, or needs the discipline of a reform school, then a system of 
parole with constant and kindly supervision from regularly con- 
stituted authorities, helps to bridge the chasm between the institu- 
tion and the regular walks of life, and aids greatly in true re- 
habilitation of character. A movement of great social interest in 
the direction of self-government and self-reform is being illustrated 
in the George Junior Republic and similar farm-homes and industrial 
schools for wayward boys and girls. 

Thirteenth: — The "Big Brother Movement" and the "Big 
Sister Movement " are efforts to aid by volunteer, personal and 
intimate moral" comradeship the wayward boy or girl who is on 



MORAL PROTECTION 173 

probation or parole and otherwise in need of help in the struggle 
to get on and up. The various agencies of similar personal minis- 
try of juvenile delinquents of the Young Men's and Young Women's 
Christian Associations link the formal work of the Courts and In- 
stitutions to individual character rehabilitation, and thus aid greatly 
in lessening immorality. 

Fourteenth: — The despoiling of youth and innocence by greed 
and lust have made a market for maidenhood, often for little girl- 
hood, in every center of population in the United States as in 
Europe. The American Vigilance Association, which is an out- 
growth of the small Vigilance Committee of the American Social 
Purity Alliance, has come into a large and nation-wide activity as 
a result of many efforts to morally safeguard young girls. The 
commercialized vice of our large cities, and the interrelation of 
the saloon and the brothel with all manner of political graft and 
civic degradation have at last forced the attention of even the 
" plain citizen," and the " sheltered woman." The ancient hideous 
partnership between prudery and selfish ignoring on the part of 
the respectable classes, and those forces of evil which conspire to 
make the slavery of the prostitute the worst and most hopeless 
that the world has known, is at last endangered by the aroused 
conscience of the nation. The formation of this national organiza- 
tion with the President of Leland Stanford University, Dr. David 
Starr Jordan at its head, is a potent sign that the time is coming 
when no civilized nation will tolerate the traffic in womanhood. 

The social evil is also being approached from another quarter, 
that of the protection of society against the diseases incident to 
prostitution. Led by that benefactor of his generation. Dr. Prince 
A. Morrow, founder of the " Society for Sanitary and Moral Pro- 
phylaxis " and author of the epoch-making book " Social Diseases 
and Marriage," the doctors are at last assuming rightful control of 
the crusade against the " great black plague." This movement is 
a triumphant attestation of the growth of moral sentiment and the 
sense of social responsibility in the medical profession, that pro- 
fession which for many years tolerated, excused and often advised, 
irregular habits among men, and consented to inhuman treatment 
of the woman offender against chastity as though she had no 
claims upon human justice. The revelations of physicians show 
forty-five per cent, of sterility in marriage due to venereal diseases, 
and forty to eighty per cent, of the more serious illnesses and dis- 



174 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

abling operations from which wives and mothers suffer traceable 
to this cause. As Dr. Morrow declares, " no disease has such a 
murderous influence upon offspring." At least twenty-five per cent, 
of the blindness and a heavy proportion of feeblemindedness can 
be laid to this result of vicious habits. And when we learn from 
the tables of investigators, some of them like Dr. Pileur, men who 
believe that " prostitution is a necessary evil," how young are the 
victims of this disease, both boys and girls, we become more sure 
that this matter is a concern of child care. The largest number 
of girls found in houses of prostitution and in institutions of pun- 
ishment by one careful study " were ruined between the ages of 
fifteen and seventeen, and a large minority between the ages of 
ten and fifteen years." Of these even an unfriendly student de- 
clared that " scarcely twenty per cent, could be said to have sought 
the life; eighty per cent, had been enticed into it, betrayed or 
tricked into it, or driven into it by extreme destitution." Seventy- 
five per cent, of prostitution among women begins before the age 
of 21 ; and most men who contract venereal disease do so before 
the age of 25. These facts make the efforts to instruct the public 
and warn youth and protect childhood in this regard the only wise 
course ; and a great national " Federation for Sex Hygiene " is 
now forming in the United States with Dr. Charles W. Eliot, Ex- 
President of Harvard College as President, to consolidate and make 
more efficient this element of moral education. 

Fifteenth: — The Women's Christian Temperance Union which 
penetrates to every smallest hamlet and most remote farmhouse 
in the United States, is the chief link between the problems con- 
nected with several phases of the moral protection of children and 
the average, little-instructed but conscientious womanhood of the 
country. The church women of the Evangelical Protestant faith 
are more influenced by this organization than by any other, and 
the Sunday Schools of these churches are more definitely reached. 
It is to this W. C. T. U. that we owe the introduction of " Tem- 
perance Physiology Teaching " into the Public Schools ; and this 
body of devoted workers is now doing more than any other to se- 
cure the teaching of sex-hygiene in schools. Whether or not 
teachers fully approve the books advocated, the aim of moral pro- 
tection is clear. Whatever may be thought of the wisdom and 
right of smoking and drinking on the part of grown men, all 
science, medical and social, has but one voice and that of con- 



MOBAI< PROTECTION 175 

demnation for the use by growing boys and girls of any form of 
stimulant or narcotic. The " Anti-Cigarette " work of this organiza- 
tion, therefore, in so far as it has lessened the evil, is of great use. 
This organization has solved, as has no other, the problem of suit- 
ing information and instruction given to the intelligence and the 
interest of very popular audiences and to readers who study little 
and must have their mental food done up in small and enticing 
packages. Its attractive Charts of " Memory Gems " chosen from 
Xenophon and Homer to Lincoln and President Taft, all illus- 
trating the beauty of temperance and the dangers of intemper- 
ance, including " moderate drinking," have caused many to think 
of the subjects involved who could never have been reached by the 
ordinary literature or lectures. Its numerous leaflets, giving the 
pith of scientific statements and moral appeals from world- 
renowned physicians, publicists and preachers, if they are not 
calculated to convince all classes of readers, do induce a serious 
consideration of one of the most vital of problems on the part of 
the masses of people who would otherwise be ignorant and in- 
different. Critics of the W. C. T. U. might well send for and read 
a full list of the manifold publications of this indefatigable band 
of women before making up their mind as to the sum total of its 
influence and work. 

Sixteenth: — The Churches, through the interdenominational 
organizations of the Young Men's and the Young Women's Chris- 
tian Associations and through the Federations and Unions of the 
pastors and membership of various sects undertaking in combination 
ethical and social work for the public good, are doing far more 
than ever before to protect youth, to succor the tempted and dis- 
tressed, and really to " save the world." The " Federal Council 
of the Churches of Christ in America," has a bureau of research 
and a standing committee on Social Organization which aim at 
allying the whole power of the evangelical sects of Christendom 
with all the social machinery of the non-churchly organizations to 
better conditions for " the least " and the worst of " these our 
brethren." The " Men and Religion Movement," which is another 
phase of this great interdenominational has for its special object 
the same practical regeneration of society itself, and includes 
special work for the young. The kindred work of the " College 
Ministry to City Children " aims to put at the service of neglected 
little ones the devotion and active help of those preparing for the 



176 SECOND INTEENATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

Christian ministry, in order that they may " learn by doing their 
real work." The Evangelical Christians are not alone in turning 
the power of the church into these practical channels of service, — 
the Jewish Women's Council with a membership of over ten thou- 
sand is one of the most potent and many-sided organizations for 
the protection of the morally exposed, especially immigrant girls, 
for the instruction of the ignorant in right ways of life and for 
the development of strong, upright and noble character in the 
young. Also the " Liberal " bodies, the Universalists and the 
Unitarians with many " free " societies outside of denominational 
lines, but permeated with the religious spirit, notably the Societies 
for Ethical Culture, make the shielding of the young, as well as 
the moral training of the child, the business of their organizations. 

Seventeenth: — Of "Rescue-Homes" and "Shelters" and like 
places for the succor of those who have actually lived a depraved 
life there is a bewildering variety. Chief among these are the 
Homes of the Salvation Army, the Hope Halls of the Ballington 
Booth Volunteers and the Homes of the Florence Crittendon Mis- 
sion. With the usefulness of these moral asylums and moral hos- 
pitals to the older men and women this paper has nothing to do; 
but the youth of many of the inmates of these homes make their 
function germane to our subject. When we learn that many girls 
found in the rescue stations are so childish that a doll is the dearest 
gift they can receive, and that the simplest plays and amusements 
appeal to them most, we cannot think of these inmates, however 
familiar with vice and crime, as needing anything so much as 
moral protection and pitying care. And when a scientific psych- 
ologist examining one hundred " fallen girls " of eighteen years of 
age finds more than one-half of them really but " ten years and 
under in mental development," we see clearly that they are of 
those " little ones " whose exploitation is the meanest of crimes ! 

Eighteenth: — The movement toward beginning the training for 
democracy in early youth, which has given us the George Junior 
Republics for the wayward and difficult boys and girls, has begun 
to inaugurate for the normal and the average well-circumstanced 
child methods of moral appeal and guidance directed toward early 
self-discipline. The " School City " has been made a part of the 
public school system in many places in the United States and, 
although not all that its advocates claim for it as a solvent of school 
difficulties in moral directions, has many features of value. Miss 



MORAL PROTECTION 177 

Jane Brownlee has added in her " system " a quite new and far 
more subtle element of self-discipline^ namely, conscious auto- 
suggestion as a help to the child in realizing his own ideal in 
personal character and in the group-life of the school. The Boy 
Scout movement has captured the imagination of thousands of 
boys and is fast assuming vast proportions. Some confusion has 
arisen in the United States over the Scout name and purpose, owing 
to a military order which has been confounded with it. " The Boy 
Scouts of America " whose " Chief Scout " is Ernest Thompson- 
Seton, places its emphasis " not on the military side but on peace 
virtues and an interest in the trades." The boys brought together 
in " patrols " and " troops " under the leadership of a carefully 
chosen elder brother and friend who is past master in the lore of 
field and wood, of stream and camp, replace the " gang " spirit 
with the fraternity ideal. Before a boy becomes a Scout he must 
promise, " On my honor I will do my best: 1. To do my duty to 
God and my country, and to obey the scout law; 2. To help other 
people at all times; 3. To keep myself physically strong, mentally 
awake and morally straight." Another organization which con- 
nects directly with church life but includes much preparation for 
citizenship, is the " Order of the Knights of King Arthur." This 
organization, which includes hundreds of members, has its " pages, 
esquires and knights," and although saturated with the spirit of 
the Round Table and the somewhat mystic element of the Idyls 
of the King, and lacking the out-of-door tendencies which are so 
valuable in the Scout movement, holds a large body of otherwise 
careless youth to high ideals of character and of service. It is 
expected that the " Knight " will enter the Church of whatever 
faith he is trained in as a final " vow "; but the previous ceremonies 
and drill, ritual and pledges, might also lead toward a conscious 
and serious entrance into the higher responsibilities of the voter's 
duty and obligation. A movement for girls similar to the Scout 
plan is forming under the leadership of Mrs. Luther H. Gulick. 
Girls, however, lack the inherited tendency of the masculine side 
of the house of life to form into groups and brotherhoods. Women 
have been held so strictly to the interests and service of the smaller 
group of their immediate households that the instinct for outside 
relationship with one's peers is not so keen in them as in boys. 
Hence, although many interesting experiments are making in 
getting and holding girls together in some congenial form of self- 



178 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

discipline and sisterhood of service^ none has yet been devised that 
takes strong hold upon the girlish imagination. It is the " post- 
graduate mother," not the undergraduate woman-child, that is now 
ready for organization for common aims. 

Nineteenth: — The moral protection and moral uplift secured 
by Trade Union and other labor reform organizations must not be 
entirely overlooked even in a hurried survey. The use of the Trade 
Union as a weapon in the fight for better conditions and compensa- 
tion for the manual laborer is most in evidence when considering 
men's organizations. But when we remember that the overwhelm- 
ing majority of women wage-earners in manual and commercial 
lines are under twenty-one years of age, and that the term of their 
wage-earning in work outside the home is from four and a half to 
five years, the term " working-girl " is proved most appropriate, 
and we understand why the Women's Trade Unions have become 
so largely educational organizations. The fact that women of 
" light and leading " are close within the very centers of influence 
and guidance in the Women's Trade Union League shows how well 
the better-advantaged womanhood of our day is learning and 
practicing the principle of sex-solidarity for the public good. 

All these private agencies for the aid of child-life and the de- 
velopment of youth rest back upon, make use of and cooperate 
with the various public provisions of community, state and nation. 
The Boards of Health, the public-school departments, the tax- 
supported hospital and dispensary service, the general asylums, 
rest-cures, convalescent homes and sanatoria of every kind, the 
courts and reformatory institutions, — all those functions and pro- 
visions of the modern State which are either penal, charitable or 
educational are vitally interrelated with the volunteer work that 
has been cited. In some instances, the private agencies arise after 
some public provision shows a need that its work shall be made 
more effective by forming an educational link between the ignorant 
and the public aid they seek, or by offering a larger force of per- 
sonal service than paid public officials can supply. In other cases, 
in the United States by far the more numerous, private agencies 
arise to take the initiative in ameliorative, preventive or construc- 
tive social work; to run ahead and establish precedents, prove 
methods, demonstrate practicability; and the State, the Town, and 
the City, follow on to make more secure, more permanent and more 



MOEAL PROTECTION 179 

democratic the approved activity for the common good. The Public 
School (and it must be understood that this term in the United 
States stands for the tax-supported, free school open on equal 
terms to all the children of a community) is the chief " residuary 
legatee " of all private experimentation in child-saving and child- 
care. Each year witnesses a new form of public-school approach 
to the home and to the general social condition which up to that 
time has been labeled " philanthropy " and held as a private duty 
of noblesse oblige, but which is now become " education " and seen 
to be a natural and rightful element of the public service. The 
opening of the public school houses as social centers is the demo- 
cratic and educational translation of the social helpfulness of the 
Settlement Movement. The school baths, swimming-pools, play- 
grounds, fresh-air rooms, special instruction of all sorts, vocational 
training and guidance, — these all are now in many communities 
provisions of public educational departments which have been 
tested by private philanthropic enterprise and have approved them- 
selves to the wisdom and common-sense of the tax-paying public. 
The new tendency, rapidly growing in the United States is to 
register all these private experiments in national organizations like 
that of the "National Society for the Study of Education," and 
then to seek to put into national laws and national agencies for 
their enforcement what is approved by experience. The establish- 
ment of a national Health Department is being actively pressed. 
The establishment of a Children's Bureau, to study all pathological 
elements of child life not now sufficiently dealt with by the Bureau 
of Education at Washington, is now an accomplished fact, and by 
the wisdom of President Taft has for its head a woman. Miss Julia 
Lathrop, who will raise it to high potency of usefulness. 

There is constantly increasing demand for the aid of needj- cen- 
ters of population in respect to education, general and special, by 
means of appropriations from the national treasury; and many so- 
cieties and individuals are making appeal for a Department of Edu- 
cation in the National Government with a Cabinet Officer at its head, 
and with most generous equipment and facilities for work, not only 
to standardize ideals of public education but to equalize more justly, 
educational opportunities throughout the Union. The present small 
and poorly sustained Bureau of Education, although giving great 
service considering its handicaps, cannot do what a great Depart- 
ment might accomplish. The tendency toward " Nationalism " 



180 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MOEAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

shown in these movements and appeals is opposed by those most 
sensitive to the ancient claim of " State Rights " ; but the incursion 
of vast numbers of immigrants^ separated from the original settlers 
of the United States by continents of racial tendency and ages of 
social development, gives a great push to the idea that all which 
concerns the life, health, and mental and moral well-being of 
potential citizenship should have the benefit of national super- 
vision and aid. Already moral protection of immigrant girls, and 
many national laws, and many activities of the National Depart- 
ment of Commerce and Labor, and of the National Bureau for the 
Administration of Justice, show that the United States is becoming 
truly a nation, with a sense of responsibility to youth and igno- 
rance and weakness alert and powerful at the center of the Federal 
Government. 

When this sense becomes fully conscious throughout the na- 
tion, and when the necessary machinery is outlined and established, 
then the scattered, varied, sometimes overlapping, always frag- 
mentary and altogether insufficient forces which make for moral 
protection as related to moral education may be organized for fully 
effective service. 



REVIEW OF RECENT AMERICAN 
LITERATURE ON MORAL EDUCATION 

Note: As the object of this volume is to put before the In- 
ternational Congress typical rather than exhaustive expressions of 
American thought on the problems of moral education, this review 
does not include many excellent works which might otherwise claim 
a place. In some instances, notable books like Miss Jane Addams' 
" Spirit of Youth and the City Streets " have been om,itted be- 
cause their subject matter has been dealt with in the papers pre- 
ceding. 



Some Relations of Religious and Secular Education 
ELLMER E. BROWN. RcUgious Education, October^ 1907. 

In this paper, Dr. Brown, (former Commissioner of Education 
of the United States) makes the plea that the most fruitful al- 
liance between education and religion for the present is to be 
found in the development of the moral potentialities of science, 
democracy and art. The signs of the times point to the fact that 
" for many in this present age, religion is reached by way of the 
moral sense, rather than morals by way of religion. It is not 
that the historic authority, the miracles, the incense of religion, 
bring men to religious convictions, which thereafter are the ground 
of all their moral convictions; but it is rather that through the 
moral sense, through hunger after righteousness, they find a moral 
universe in which the all-righteous God is their Father." Hence 
the best meeting place for education and religion in this age is 
on the moral plane. 

Modern education is allied with modern science. Religious 
education must therefore assimilate the standards and processes 
of education in science. This means among other things, that it 
must give up the sectarianism which is so sharply contrasted with 
the unifying tendency of science. It must furthermore quicken 
devotion to truth. At bottom the religious sense for truth and 
the scientific are at one. Historically they have been different. 
The task of education in the future is to unite them. The best 

181 



182 SECOND INTEHNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

way of doing this in our age is to make the most of the moral 
possibilities in the studj of science. "Scientific education teaches 
men to follow truth for the sake of truth in the full con- 
viction that human interests and clear truth must in the end be 
one. ... In loyalty to truth . . . our public education 
rises to the summit of its power." 

Modern education is also wedded to democracy. " Demo- 
cratic education seeks the good of every man because he is man and 
so reaches its high moral conception of social service." The 
brotherhood of man for which democracy stands, the older re- 
ligious conception derived from the fatherhood of God. This age 
seems destined on the other hand to arrive at the idea of God 
the father through intensifying the sense of men as brothers. 
Education can serve religion best by holding true to its alliance 
with democracy. 

Education must seek a third alliance, namely with art, be- 
cause this too has ineradicable moral implications. Art recognizes 
values as well as facts. "It has canons which represent the ma- 
tured experience, the chastened pang and rapture of the race and 
are not to be disclosed or verified in any moment of time by any 
individual fragment of the race." 

" When modern education has fully entered into this three- 
fold alliance with natural science, democracy, and art, its newer, 
safer, and more fruitful alliance with religion will, we doubt not, 
be near at hand and even at the door." 



Boy's Self-Governing Clubs. 

WINIFRED BUCK. (MacmiUau.) 

This little book describes the author's experiences with boys' 
clubs in a Settlement House in New York City. It is full of sug- 
gestions as to ways by which the boys' conduct of their club afi"air3 
may be interpreted to them to bring out underlying ethical prin- 
ciples, from the principles of courtesy and justice behind the rules 
of Parliamentary procedure to the graver problems of trustworthi- 
ness in the care of funds. In the treatment of oiFenders the boys 
may be taught valuable lessons in the ethics of punishment. Left to 
themselves, they are prone to estimate the gravity of an oifense, not 
impersonally but in terms of their own discomfort. As further 



REVIEW OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 183 

illustration of ethical possibilities, the author mentions cases where 
the boys may be taught the nature of disinterested group service. 
She says that like many adults they often regard it as legitimate 
to accept a bribe where no obvious wrong is demanded and where 
on the contrary positive service has been rendered. Instances of 
this sort offer fruitful opportunity for ethical clarification. 

P. L. 



The Ethical Value of Industrial Education: from "Prin- 
ciples OF Secondary Education," (Vol. Ill, " Ethical 
Training.") 

CHARLES DE GARMO. (Macmillan.) 

From the chapters entitled " Realizing the Ethical Value of the 
High School Studies," we select the following brief quotations: 

" Industrial subjects have a larger moral potency as ethical 
instruments than those of disciplinary and cultural education, for 
the same reason that applied is superior to pure science. 
It comes to the teacher with a shock of surprise that whenever 
he touches a live wire of this kind, he gets a flash of light and 
energy that seems to transform the doltish or rebellious youth 
into a new being. We already partly utilize this latent energy in 
our management of the truant and incorrigible, by giving them 
at least a partial chance to utilize their inherited powers in manual 
training. But is it not a pity that we should reserve our natural 
education for the dolt or the rebel? We use all the resources of 
natural docility, all the force of parental authority, all the in- 
fluences of social pressure to hold the great mass of children to s 
repressive and receptive, though perhaps not imhappy and op- 
pressive, education by desk and book. The education we give is 
not bad in itself; indeed, it is beneficent and necessary; but it 
is partial, since it appeals to but one-half of human nature, and 
that not the strongest and most effective. Most of those we teach 
in the schools come from a not distant ancestry that never knew 
the restraint of the desk or the enlightenment that comes through 
the book, but they do come from an ancestry trained even to the 
remotest past through productive labor. Education should utilize 
these stored-up forces." 

The student takes a new attitude toward his studies when 



184 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

they are grouped around industrial purposes instead of being a 
meaningless, academic aggregation of unrelated subjects. He 
" works with a hope and understanding and enthusiasm that are 
often painfully lacking in general education. In so-called culture 
courses, that is given to the student which seems good for him; 
but in industrial courses, . . . that is given which seems good 
to him. ... In a school whose curriculum is thus organized, 
discipline practically takes care of itself, for the institution seems 
to the youth a real, and not an artificial thing. Teachers become 
to him friends and guides, not educational policemen on the watch 
for the infraction of rules. The occupations of the class-rooms 
prepare for those of laboratory and shop, and these in turn seem 
to him instinct with the incentives that move men in the outside 
world. The industrial subjects simply carry the ethical signifi- 
cance of applied science one step farther, in that they permeate 
and consecrate to living ends all the other contributory subjects of 
the curriculum." 

Moral Principles in Education 
JOHN DEWEY. (Houghton Mifflin Co.) 

The author elaborates in this work his well-known paper 
on " Ethical Principles underlying Education " previously published 
by the National Herbart Society for the Study of Education. He 
begins with the distinction between " moral ideals " and " ideals 
about moralty," the former being ideals of any sort whatever 
which genuinely take effect on conduct and improve it, 
the latter being information which may or may not transmute 
itself into good character. The business of the school 
is to see that the greatest possible number of ideas ac- 
quired by children and youth are of the former kind, that 
is, obtained in such a vital way that they become moving ideas, 
motive forces in the guidance of conduct. Direct moral instruc- 
tion Professor Dewey therefore regards as comparatively small 
in influence when measured against the indirect development of 
character through the training afforded by the school life as a 
whole. 

These indirect agencies are in general three in number, (1) 
the life of the school as a community, (2) the methods of in- 
struction, (3) the social nature of the subjects studied. 



REVIEW OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 185 

In providing the training which comes from life in the school 
commiuiity, teachers are all too apt to emphasize pathologic and 
formal aspects. Stress is laid upon correcting wrong-doing in- 
stead of upon forming habits of positive service, i. e., the habits 
of initiative, leadership and vital interest in community welfare, 
most needed in a progressive democracy. These powers can be 
developed only as the school reproduces within itself typical con- 
ditions of social life outside instead of emphasizing regulations 
which appeal to the child as only conventional and arbitrary re- 
quirements. " The habits of promptness, regularity, industry, non- 
interference with the works of others, faithfulness to tasks im- 
posed, which are specially inculcated in the school are habits that 
are necessary simply because the school system is what it is, and 
must be preserved intact. If we grant the inviolability of the 
school system as it is, these habits represent permanent and neces- 
sary moral ideas; but just in so far as the school system is itself 
isolated and mechanical, insistence upon these moral habits is more 
or less unreal, because the ideal to which they relate is not itself 
necessary. The duties in other words are distinctly school duties, 
not life duties. If we compare this condition with that of the 
well ordered home, we find that the duties and the responsibilities 
that the child has there to recognize do not belong to the family 
as a specialized and isolated institution, but flow from the very 
nature of the social life in which the family participates and to 
which it contributes. The child ought to have the same motives 
for right doing and to be judged by the same standard in the 
school, as the adult in the wider social life to which he belongs. 
Interest in community welfare, an interest that is intellectual 
and practical, as well as emotional, — an interest, that is to say, 
in perceiving whatever makes for social order and progress, and 
in carrying these principles into execution — is the moral habit 
to which all the special school habits must be related if they are 
to be animated by the breath of life." 

The moral training from methods of instruction, the second 
agency, is at its best when instead of emphasizing passive, individual, 
competitive absorption as the mode of learning, scope is allowed 
for active, social, co-operative modes. In the common old-fashioned 
method, " the child is prematurely launched into the region of 
individualistic competition, and this in a direction where competi- 
tion is least applicable, namely, in intellectual and artistic mat- 



186 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

ters^ whose law is co-operation and participation." He is ex- 
pected to absorb, to appreciate the productions of others, rather 
than to add to the world's values by his own powers. He is en- 
couraged too constantly to get ahead of others and not enough to 
work with others in forwarding common aims of social service. 

The school studies make the third resource. The various 
subjects should be considered not as a series of isolated branches 
of learning but as instruments for bringing the child to understand 
the unified social life which each study is meant in its own way 
to interpret and to further. Geography, for example, has to do 
with all those aspects of social life which are concerned with the 
interaction of man's life with nature. History has ethical value 
to the extent to which past events are made the means of under- 
standing the structure and workings of society to-day. " What 
the normal child continuously needs is not so much isolated moral 
lessons upon the importance of truthfulness and honesty, or the 
beneficent results that follow from a particular act of patriotism, 
as the formation of habits of social imagination and conception." 

In discussing these various agencies. Professor Dewey is 
thinking of the school as primarily an instrument for the creation 
of social intelligence, social power and social interests. It can- 
not be said to be organized on an ethical basis unless it sets this 
threefold aim definitely before itself. Its problem therefore must 
first be to understand the social reference, the " what " of the con- 
duct which it seeks to realize. The other aspect of its problem 
is psychologic: i. e., inasmuch as conduct has a certain method 
and spirit also — its "how," we must know (1) what are the na- 
tive instincts and impulses out of which all behavior ultimately 
and radically springs; (2) what they are at each particular stage 
of the child's development. 

The difficulty in the past has been that character has been 
conceived too generally in terms of results. We need to conceive 
it clearly in psychologic terms, that is, as a process, as working 
or dynamic. One necessary constituent of moral behavior is force, 
efficiency in execution as distinguished from the good intentions 
upon which moral books and lectures are prone to lay stress. 
Since sheer force, however, may be brutal, or mistaken and harm- 
ful in its ends, it must in the second place be organized along 
social channels, the really valuable ends. But the consciousness 
of these ends must be more than merely intellectual; it must be 



REVIEW OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 187 

emotionally responsive to the ends and interests of others. The 
problem of the school is therefore (1) to afford sufficient op- 
portunity for the spontaneous instincts and impulses to work out 
their own results; (2) to afford the conditions necessary for the 
formation of good judgment (the sense of relative values), con- 
ditions, that is, which allow the child to select for himself and 
to attempt to put his selections into execution for a final test of 
their soundness; (3) to train the child in sympathetic openness 
and responsiveness by allowing free social intercourse between 
pupils and between pupils and teacher, and by bringing him into 
contact with what is most vital in history, in literature, in his 
aesthetic environment. 

The author summarizes his plea in the following words : " We 
need ... a genuine faith in the existence of moral principles 
which are capable of effective application. . . . We believe 
in moral laws and rules, to be sure, but they are in the air. They 
are so very ' moral ' that they have no working contact with the 
average affairs of every-day life. These moral principles need 
to be brought down to the ground through their statement in social 
and in psychologic terms. We need to see that moral principles 
are not arbitrary, that they are not ' transcendental ' ; that the 
term * moral ' does not designate a special region or portion of 
life. We need to translate the moral into the conditions and 
forces of our community life, and into the impulses and habits of 
the individual. . . . The teacher who operates in this faith 
[that moral principles are inherent in community life and in the 
working structure of the individual] will find every subject, every 
method of instruction, every incident of school life, pregnant with 
moral possibility." 

Social Aspects of Education. 

IRVING KING (Macmillan.) 

This work consists of a series of "sources " (from books, 
magazine articles, speeches and the like) and original discussions 
on various phases of the school life as a social activity and as an 
agency for social progress. It aims to introduce students in nor- 
mal schools and teachers in practice to an understanding of the 
twofold social relationship of the school, — its internal character 
as a community and its relation to the life of society outside. 



188 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 

Under the first heading, the author considers the general na- 
ture of group life, the spontaneous social life of children, the so- 
cial life of the school as expressed in its government, and con- 
cludes with the bearing of such corporate activity upon the de- 
velopment of character. Under the second head, he outlines the 
social origin of the school, its responsibilities to society and its 
relationship to other agents of social progress. The cl^apters are 
built around " documents " and the author's introductions or 
presentations. Each contains an annotated bibliography besides 
a list of topics for further study. 

The Boy and His Gang 
J. ADAMS PUFFER. (Houghton Mifflin Co.) 

The boys' gang used to be looked upon as the surest evidence 
of total depravity. The new point of view studies the 
gang to discover the interests which lead to its formation and 
to see whether these instincts cannot be turned to account in making 
it over into an instrument for moral betterment. Such a study 
has been attempted in this book by Mr. Puffer, who is Director 
of the Beacon Vocation Bureau, Boston. 

During the period of life beginning at about the tenth year 
and extending to the sixteenth, the boy, up till that time individual- 
istic, tends by instinct to associate with other boys in the formation 
of gangs. These gangs, though spontaneous, are the result of cer- 
tain normal, well-defined needs of the boy's nature and are char- 
acterized by definite group activities, such as playing games, travel- 
ing, stealing, fighting. Of the sixty-six gangs studied by Mr. 
Puffer, all had as their reasons for being most or all of these pur- 
poses. The gangs were more or less well-organized bodies with 
one or more leaders, chosen for their superiority in activities call- 
ing for strength, daring or the like. They showed entire freedom 
from race-prejudice in their membership. Rules exacting loyalty 
and just treatment of one member by another were found to be 
prevalent. Each gang had a local habitation or meeting place, 
such as a particular street, lot, and so forth. On the whole, the 
gang, either good or bad, is shown by the description given it to be 
a social organism with specific possibilities arising from its col- 
lective nature, which the individual boy is incapable of realizing 
without membership in some such organization. 



REVIEW OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 189 

Psychologically the gang in its activities can be said to re- 
capitulate, in the main, the life of savage primitive man. In its 
group fighting, migratory habits (Wanderlust), predatory habits, 
etc., it repeats the chief occupations of adult man in early times. 
Its main function may be said to be to prepare the way for the 
future life of its members as social beings. 

Of these activities of the gang, some, such as plaguing people, 
are entirely anti-social and of little value as a training for the 
life of manhood; others, such as fighting, though anti-social, teach 
physical and moral courage, self-reliance and self-control. Steal- 
ing by the gang as a unit can be converted into a worthy habit 
of collecting natural objects or of making articles in workshop 
groups. Wanderlust, or the desire for travel, which sometimes 
leads to unfortunate results, is normal and can be utilized to great 
value in trips into the country or to historic places. Group games 
or sports, such as baseball, are wholly desirable, and result in 
physical health, training of the will and intelligence, and, best of 
all, the formation of such social habits as cooperation and obedience 
to the group will. Adequate playgrounds are an essential to the 
full realization of this aim. Theater-going, a favorite pastime 
of gang members, if confined to melodrama and instructive or spec- 
tacular moving-picture or other shows, is at least not harmful. 

" The gang is a natural and necessary stage in normal de- 
velopment." Its activities cannot, for the most part, be suppressed, 
and they therefore require direction to the end that its members 
become useful, normal citizens. Loyalty, self-command, obedience, 
self-sacrifice and cooperation are qualities taught in one way or 
another by most gangs, good and bad. Even group stealing, as 
an extreme instance, emphasizes loyalty, cooperation and courage. 
All these traits fostered by gang-life are of positive value at 
bottom and can be made social in their result, if for the anti- 
social occupations like stealing or plaguing people are substituted 
those that have been mentioned. 

H. D. 

How Two Hundred Children Live and Learn 

RUDOLPH R. reeder. (Charities Publication Company, New York) 

Dr. Reeder, Superintendent of an orphanage at Hastings on 
the Hudson, New York, lays the major emphasis upon the moral 



190 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAI, EDUCATION CONGRESS 

value of the influence which children can be led to exert upon one 
another. How are they to be provided with moral experiences, 
rather than merely academic and intellectual contacts ? — this he 
conceives to be the main problem. 

" One moral experience is worth a score of formal lessons in 
morality. One of the boys in our garden class stole radishes from 
another boy's garden and was caught in the act by two or three 
of his companions. All of the gardeners were at once assembled; 
the boy and his case were set before them. After some informal 
discussion a motion was made by one of the children that the boy 
forfeit his garden. It was one of the best in the plot^ and he had 
spent much time on it, but by his deed he had violated property 
rights and thus forfeited his right of its ownership. The motion 
was unanimously carried. When the assembly was asked if there 
was any further business concerning the matter, it was moved by 
one of the children that this boy be required ' to weed all of the 
other gardens.' This motion was not entertained by the chair, 
but would no doubt have carried if a vote had been taken on it: 
first, because recent rains had greatly increased the growth of 
weeds in the gardens ; second, because of natural laziness in re- 
lation to such work . . . and third, because the thief was an 
unpopular boy. 

" Soon after the walls and ceilings of one of our boys' cottages 
had been decorated, a boy made with a nail an ugly scratch 
about ten feet long through the paint on the wall of one of the 
dormitories. . . . He was brought to the office by other boys of 
the cottage with the request that he be * everlastingly licked.' But 
they were shown that there was no connection between the cul- 
prit's offense and a ' licking.' They were then given some in- 
structions as to principles of punishment with special reference 
to the fact that punishment should bear a natural relation to the 
offense, and that it should, when possible, take the form of an 
indeterminate sentence. The matter was referred back to the 
boys for further deliberation. The decision reached and presented 
the following day was that the boy should sleep in the attic, going- 
to bed in the dark, until such time as it was thought safe for him 
to return to the dormitory. He was kept sleeping in the attic 
for about six weeks. 

" Several interesting inferences may be drawn from such in- 
stances as these. First, that children are capable of rational ac- 



REVIEW OF AMERICAJSr LITERATURB 191 

tion upon moral questions. Second, that it is unsafe to give ab^ 
solute authority" into their hands, as has been attempted in some 
of our school government schemes; for children are emotional and 
may be mercilessly cruel in passing judgment and executing moral 
or governmental functions. Third, that participation in govern- 
ment under proper restriction is an essential factor in the train- 
ing of the future citizens of a democracy, and that helping to 
discipline and govern others promotes self-government. Not one 
case of stealing from gardens has been reported, or to our knowl- 
edge has occurred since this case, which happened three years 
ago. The damage to the wall was repaired, and no similar case 
of vandalism in the cottage has occurred for about the same 
period. 

" Children, as far as they are able to understand should be 
conscious of the process through which they are passing. Noth- 
ing will secure their cooperation more surely than to understand 
your purposes concerning them. I have found it a good plan to 
place before them for solution problems in child-training con- 
cerning themselves and other children. Attempts to solve such 
problems lead the child to introspection and self-inquiry." 

Dr. Reeder is by no means inclined to underestimate the 
value of direct moral instruction. It should indeed be given with 
a place allowed for it on the regular program. " The fear of 
making a moral lesson or application too direct or too obvious has 
become a fetish with many parents and teachers, and the result 
often is that no moral instruction whatever, is given. . . . 
In attempting to adjust methods of discipline and in- 
struction to the caprice of the child, many parents and teachers 
have [come to rely] upon devices and expedients rather than 
principles. I once knew an indulgent mother who was unable to 
get her young son tO' bed without resorting to devices, one of 
which was for a member of the family to impersonate a hotel 
proprietor, receive the boy as a guest and show him his room. 

" Cases in which direct instruction given in season would no 
doubt have served as prevention . . . have come within my 

experience. K , at fifteen years of age, told me what a hard 

struggle he had had to break up an injurious personal habit after 
my first conference with the boys on the subject some two years 
before; also, that he had not known the practice was wrong or 
would work injury to him until so instructed. 



192 SECOND INTEBNATIONAL MORAL, EDUCATION CONGRESS 

" Just as school nurses and settlement workers find in 
thousands of homes, deplorable ignorance concerniiig dietary, 
sanitation, the care of the children and the sick, resulting in ill 
health and a high mortality rate, so many teachers if they inquire, 
find distressing ignorance among school children concerning per- 
sonal habits, purity, temperance, righteous living, etc. 
Direct instruction properly given will go a long way toward en- 
lightenment and prevention." 



Social Education 

COLIN c. SCOTT. (Ginu & Co.) 

This book is a plea for readjustment of school conditions to al- 
low two needed reforms: (1) Independent thinking on the part 
of the pupils, to counteract the deadly uniformity encouraged by 
the usual conditions where the teacher prescribes the material and 
the modes of thinking for a whole class alike; (2) Self-organ- 
ized and self-directed groups of pupils, in order to provide train- 
ing in democratic responsibility. The second aim includes the first. 
The author insists upon the conception of the school as a social 
organism, created by society in order to influence society effec- 
tively. It can not perform its social service adequately unless it 
trains pupils in the two main requirements for social life — re- 
sponsibility as members of some group, and initiative. 

From this point of view, the author discusses three types 
of school. In Chapter 3, he describes Abbotsholme in England, 
but finds its ideal unavailable for America because it is monarch- 
ical. In Chapter 4, he discusses the George Junior Republic. He 
can not count this as an ideal for the public school, first, because 
it is intended for abnormal boys and girls, and second, because 
of its exaggerated emphasis on legal and economic features. The 
children who compose this institution are mainly delinquents who 
are already preternaturally and morbidly sharpened on the legal 
and economic aspects of life. In the third place, the Junior Re- 
public allows only seli-government, i. e., it is an institution 
created by adults and turned over in part for the children to 
run themselves. They are not responsible for its inception and 
its continuance. What our schools need in order to provide training 
in genuine group-service is to allow place for groups called into 



REVIEW OF AMERICAJSr LITERATURE 193 

being by the children themselves, and capable of going to pieces 
entirely as soon as the members fail to keep them working. 

In Chapter 5, Professor Scott lauds the value of Professor 
Dewey's contributions to education in the experimental school con- 
ducted under his supervision (see Dewey: "School and Society"). 
Dr. Dewey has done much, he says, to show that it is the course 
of study (rather than as in Abbotsholme, the rest of the daily life, 
or as in the Junior Republic, the legal and economic feature) 
which is the essential work of the school and into which the spirit 
of democratic social service ought to be introduced. Nevertheless, 
argues Professor Scott, something more is needed. The course 
of study is organized by the teacher. The responsibility for 
initiating it and seeing it carried through is not the pupils' but the 
teacher's. In studying it, the children get valuable social lessons 
in co-operation, obedience and the like, but not the training in 
initiative and responsibility which comes from self-organized, self- 
directing groups. 

The remainder of the book illustrates how this training may 
be made possible in the ordinary school. Professor Scott de- 
scribes how children in various schools under his observation 
formed groups for cooking, for printing, for photography, for 
sewing, for dramatic presentations. The groups were organized 
entirely by the youngsters who selected their own leader when one 
was necessary. They were free to choose for themselves what 
work they would do. Not all of the work of the school, by any 
means, was left to them. In many cases the groups were 
organized for activities that lasted less than an hour a day. In 
one third-year class of fifty children, thirty-eight different 
groups were formed during the year, and there was no child who 
was not a member of one or more of these groups. About sixty 
per cent, thus got the opportunity for leadership. As an illustra- 
tion of how such a group may contribute tQ the learning of the 
prescribed subjects, the author tells how a seventh-grade group 
organized itself in order to work out a way of ascertaining the 
cubic contents of a standpipe which supplied their town with water. 
The moral value of all this self-directed activity. Professor 
Scott finds in the training in group-responsibility, leadership and 
free selection of purposes whose inception as well as execution 
rests entirely with the members themselves. 

H. A. 



194 SECOND INTERNATIONAL MORAL EDUCATION CONGRESS 



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Working with the Hands. 
BOOKER t. WASHINGTON. (Doubleday, Page & Co.) 

The author, who has devoted all his life to the moral and 
economic emancipation of his fellow-negroes, is convinced that 
their salvation lies in the social and personal discipline which 
comes from manual labor. The negro as a slave " was worked " ; 
now that he is free, he must make a man of himself by working. In 
the course of extensive travels Dr. Washington found that a ma- 
jority of the blacks were tillers of the soil; but that owing to gross 
ignorance of proper methods, they were barely able to eke out 
an existence. To teach them how to work wisely, he founded 
Tuskegee Institute, the school described in this volume. 

The first courses offered were agricultural. With the de- 
velopment of this department, there arose the need for courses in 
poultry-raising, lumbering, carpentry, building, and road-making. 
Everything at Tuskegee, from the well-constructed buildings to 
the daintily prepared meals in the model kitchen, is made by the 
students themselves. They learn by doing. 

The economic aspects have been stressed by Dr. Washington; 
for he believes that with an ignorant and poverty-stricken race, 
the first essential is to teach them how to win their bread. This, 
however, does not mean the slurring of character development. 
On the contrary, Tuskegee tries always to make the two go hand 
in hand. No detail is unimportant from this point of view. The 
personal appearance of each student, the way he spends his funds, 
the care he takes of his own property and that of the school are 
all as much a part of his education as learning how to cultivate the 
soil. 

To reach the negro home, Tuskegee also educates the girls. 
Its courses in domestic science, nursing, sewing, furniture making, 
are attended by students from all over the country. These women 
upon graduation return to their homes, and in true Tuskegee spirit 
give to the community at large what it has been their privilege 
to receive. To reach those who are not able to come to the In- 
stitute, Tuskegee conducts Farmers' Conferences and Mothers' 
Meetings. It distributes literature, and has established day 
schools, night schools and settlements. 

L. M. 



REVIEW OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 195 

Further information on the subject of Moral Education in 
America may be found in the following: 

Educational Problems, by G. Stanley Hall. (Appleton & 
Co., 2 Vols.) Contains a chapter on Moral Education with brief 
resumes of the studies (statistical and other), made by recent in- 
vestigators. 

The Coming Generation, by William B. Forbush (Appleton & 
Co., 12mo. pp. 402), is a summary of " all the forces that are 
working for the betterment of American young people." It shows 
what is being done to meet the problems of home training, moral 
training in school, eugenics, prevention of crime, vocational guid- 
ance, recreation, economic difficulties, social service and religious 
training. It contains copious bibliographic references. 

Religious Education, a bi-monthly published by the Religious 
Educational Association, 193 Michigan Avenue, Chicago, 111. (Sub- 
scription three dollars a year.) The number for February^ 1911 
contains an account of methods of moral education in a number of 
States in the Union besides a bibliography of fifteen quarto pages 
on Moral Instruction in the Public Schools. The Association has 
organized a special council charged with the specific duty of 
furthering a non-sectarian moral education in the schools main- 
tained by the public. Many excellent papers on this subject are 
contained in the 1911 and 1912 numbers. 

Education with Reference to Sex, the Eighth Yearbook of 
the National Society for the Scientific Study of Education 
(University of Chicago Press), is a survey by Professor Charles 
R. Henderson, of the pathological, economic, social aspects of 
the problem, and agencies and methods by which solution is at- 
tempted. 

The Survey (subscription two dollars a year), a weekly Jour- 
nal of Constructive Philanthropy published by the Charity Or- 
ganization Society of New York, contains articles on matters of 
social, charitable and civic concern, with news of meetings, dis- 
cussions, reports, practical efforts, reviews and the like. It is 
invaluable for the educator who is interested in the relation of 
moral education to social reform. 



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